Covet, Covenant
by RanOutOfBatteries
Summary: Java realizes that the world will bow down before her in reverence, and she is afraid of the power they give her. Alma Torran, she thinks, was a far better place than this.
1. Chapter 1

id say this was inevitable but eh whatever

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Chapter 1

Rukh runs in their veins like clockwork.

Oil spills between their fingertips easily, melting off their skin without any trace of black markings. They twist and turn their hands, uncaring of the way their fingernails were picked apart or how their hair fell over their eyes: they simply remained, and that was all. The murky water remained.

Simple tasks, that's what they were. It was not unusual for rukh followers to gain skills like these when on the run: they used backhanded tricks, weaving through crowds like multicolored koi fish, entranced by the crowd but too fast to catch. Light illusions, magic tricklings, they became secondhand. What did it matter? They just needed to survive. All things became secondary to that.

Java glanced up through partly-blocked vision, one hand casually shoved in a ragged pocket. Silver coins, gold coins. Paper money. They were all taken, and the hand fell accordingly.

The trailings of rukh shimmered above them, a second sea of light in comparison to the similarly-moving crowd below. Her eyes glanced up, subconsciously drawn to that incomprehensible pull that always managed to take hold upon her (upon them all, they didn't exist anymore stop it). Spirits of the damned, the old used to call it. They were messengers of the souls of those deceased, memories without purpose and people without a calling. Moral compasses for those who needed them.

Java's mouth pulled down into a scowl and her eyes decidedly fixed on a distracted shopkeeper as she turned her head away forcefully. Too much time had been spent staring, searching, wanting that reason but left with no answers. Those explanations were only folktales.

No matter. She ducked her head as she passed underneath a low-built bridge _(shortcut, run quick before it finds you),_ stone carvings placed to match the grooves in the railings. Wherever humans were, the rukh were as well. Same with all living beings, existential matters aside. They did not exist without a source, and all moving things breathed anyway. Java almost likened them to parasites, but they were much too pretty _(much too kind, too much)_ for that.

Silver rukh shifted in her palm, luminescent ( _a reminder, something she'd forgotten, why? Who cares it's all gone now anyway)_ and she quashed it with a relentless hand, clenching one shaking fist until half moons bore almost-red with the force she'd given it. She moved without a sound, eyes already elsewhere. It didn't matter.

Cloth strings dyed mahogany tied back loose folds of tent flaps, curtains, caravan seatings. The ground rumbled with the sound of feet and hooves, chaotic messes in the way only people could make. Dully Java heard the clink of chains and narrowed her vision until the rukh was gone, it would stop blinding her with its sight and the smell of rotten fruit, rotten apples. Silver, gold. Bared teeth. Darkened eyes. Her breathing slowed.

She continued on past the town and towards one of the large exits near the palace, high seatings of jeweled decorations and so many cultures intertwined in their foods and appearance (the clothing of the Heliohapt, the sea splendor of the Imuchakk). Vines traveled slowly along the edges like a rising crescendo, pouring over the walls she traveled past and waving underneath the bridge in sweeping movements.

Astrology felt strange, foreign to her. The stars were in the wrong places now, the entire perspective shifted. Constellations had vanished, replaced by meanings and new lights entirely different and somehow less overall. Night was the last place she wanted to be, black tendrils following after her with the greed to destroy, to tarnish with those deaths and prayers and half-hoped fatalities that was concentrated into too much feeling. It pulled the mind psychologically. It was too much.

 _(Once upon a time, in another world far gone and beyond their reach, three magi and a king formed a covenant, an agreement that this was for the best. Java's mouth remained shut. It would become nonexistent in the span of time: persistence would shut memory out.)_

And she was _angry:_ for a long time afterward, they raged and fought and battled and waged wars along the years branching onward. The rukh felt agonizing, like temperatures that felt a bit too cold for her liking, a bit too hot for comfort. Their history remained written in the rubble, far below in the ruins whose lands had been built upon and changed to fit the people sprouting forth from it. The Old World called out to those yearning: she was sure every magi still heard it. Java nearly cried from the force.

 _Take me home. Take me back, please. I cannot live like this anymore._

 _Home, home, home, home-_

Grief is dark, broiling, hatred that burns the eyes and blazes like meteors across skin. Hatred here still felt wrong to her, too rough and revenge-stricken and unbecoming, love felt too unconditional, too much for the feeling without the integrity that came alongside it. Emotions were like limbs, too long and out of place. Java jerked back to attention, eyes alight with surprise. She was standing at a lightened pavement, almost completely deserted due to the heat of the sun blazing down without any semblance of cover.

Violence was natural. The Old World was natural. They had lived with beasts, struggled just like the rest, and this was the solution they had all come up with. It felt despicable to her now: the world was not meant to be split like this. Good and evil, wrong and right. What did it matter? Nobody was ever that perfect, and she despised anyone who thought otherwise. To be characterized by how much they used the rukh, sorted into slots and personalized, that seemed such a terrible thing to become. (The judge.) Smash that pedestal down, her blood drummed, beating counterclockwise, reverberating loud, dark against the second reckoning. _Ignore it._ Return, return, return.

( _And unbeknownst to her, the rukh swirled in rivulets above, dancing faerie lights remembering the memories she did, singing to the history that they once remembered as_ well.)

* * *

Silver rukh was always something I'd thought about, and I was never able to shake off that idea. I haven't been updated on the manga and I finished where the anime did, so whatever inconsistencies occur will be solely my decision.

I've written about Java three years ago when I was still doing half-assed writing. I'm still doing that, to be honest, but I've gotten a little better about it. Oops.

I'm done for now. If I do write any more, I hope you enjoy it.

See you later!


	2. Chapter 2

hsgdfhjhghjs

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Chapter 2

The underneath always felt a little darker when she visited it.

It remained one of the few places that remained tethered to the realm of the old. Foreboding to trespassers, welcoming to those who stayed. The rukh shimmered here, bright with remembrance. Ambition led the foolish here: the smarter ones would know that they could never return.

It was just after noon that the landscape had started morphing into dangerous, dreamlike lands that she had remembered a long time ago. She glanced around at the fog that had rolled in so thickly, choosing to stay near the trees for now. The darkness was coming in quickly and she could see the dry soil parting way to large cracks in the ground, awkward fissures that would seem out of place if Java did not know where she was. She chose to slow down, her breaths quicker and strained and heart beating faster.

Her eyes watched carefully, observant on how the fog obscured her vision. The hairs on her neck prickled. Crows were the only thing she heard for the moment, the cawing distracting to the rest of her senses. She was nearing the edge: she could feel the more concentrated areas of magic fall behind her, pockets of empty space before the long drop, and she let out a breath that she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

Java's gaze trailed upwards until she saw the ravine.

It was a ravine; she knew that, it was obvious, but even then she could not see the other side of the rock face. The fog held them like a shroud, letting her see no more than an arm's length away, and she felt as if she was a wandering, lost soul in search of her final resting place. This haze was not something a simple water djinn could handle. The cliff stood a meter or so away from the forest edge, and she held her breath as she left the two cypress trees she had stopped under.

There was no hesitation. She took a running start and flew blindly off the edge.

(In her mind's eye, far different from the previous times she had entered the Dark Continent, she remembered this scene from different eyes. Magenta hair flew back and across her vision as she hurtled down below, silver chains unwinding to propel her from the rock and find purchase in midair-)

Java shook her head, blinking furiously. _Not now._

She observed her surroundings warily for each second passed, noticing the explosion of leaves fall in a pattern on the rock behind her as she immediately held up a hand to brush past them. Yunan's magic.

She remembered the time and halted after the long way down. Ten minutes, thirty-eight seconds. And not a moment too soon: her nose hovered centimeters above the ground, halted by the bubble of water she'd protected herself in. The liquid cushioning her burst upon stopping her momentum, letting her fall on her knees and catching herself by the heels of her palms. She paled, scratching a second off the countdown. She'd have to remember the next time she came down here again.

"What a great invitation, Yunan," she drawled, noticing the dead plant life surrounding her in the brief attempt to grow. The sun's rays never reached the lowest reaches, no matter how hard he tried. Carefully placing the stick back on the ground, Java dusted off a black leaf stuck to her shirt.

Moving slowly, Java struggled a bit to see the telltale light of Yunan's place. Even here, the fog was suffocating. Java closed her eyes and breathed in the air, bare of rukh due to the lack of growth. It pulled her closer, guiding her footsteps as she followed after in compliance. Yunan stood: silent, still, illuminated by the warm light guiding stragglers to his house, floppy green hat spinning lazily as he sensed her approach. She had not realized she had missed him.

She visibly relaxed.

The sharp slant of his mouth and his set jaw she had not previously remembered, new and distressing to the matter he had called her for, but those eyes were the same: bright, startlingly blue eyes that had not matured with the rest of him no matter how long time had passed between them. Her breathing slowed as she moved closer, returning his smile with a grin of her own, in equal fervor. Magoi channeled through her body as she concentrated her sight, leaving her shoulders and torso dangerously low in magoi levels. His brow furrowed briefly as her magic washed over him, but he soon returned her assessing gaze with a calm that she did not feel.

"Well, now I know that you're not dying," she joked, seeing Yunan's mouth turn upwards in amusement. "What's the problem?"

His eyes drifted to the far beyond, shrouded in the distance by time, and Java soon followed his gaze. "Do you feel it?" He murmured, his cloak just covering the shrug of his shoulders. "Do you feel the thunder in the rukh?"

The abnormality quaked at her touch, Yunan's presence close by her side. She prodded gently at the ancient magic: clustered both ahead of them in the fog and above them in the strengthened forests, she could feel the turmoil in the wings of the rukh as they beat to a different drum. A new factor was at play, and Java did not recognize its pattern. She frowned.

No: she was lying. She recognized this pattern all too well, beating loud in her ears and her very system, in the hand ridden with silver scars and in her entirety. They both knew what it meant. Java's heartbeat quickened.

"...Yeah, I feel it," she said, eyes alight with something he could not quite place. Sadness, anger, resignation. Fear. "It's closing in."

Yunan stared at her, rukh shining distractedly like moonlight on her palm and wrist, and for a brief moment he shuddered at the look in her eyes. Here was another being so unlike his own, and he would never begin to understand her purpose. He never questioned it, however. He knew.

There were things that he knew he couldn't do, what none of the magi could ever do; having rukh that fought wounds, for one. He saw the flashes of gore, dead parents, the cruel men and the same nine circles of hell that played in his mind like a record tape rewinding itself over and over. And yet, although their eyes fell upon the same events in the rukh's timeline, he was unable to confront these atrocities in the same way she did. These memories were stripped of emotion, indeed, but even Yunan became swept up by their tide and filled in the empty parts in some semblance of completeness. He was a pacifist, but even he avoided making contact with the black rukh with the grim reminder that it could turn him, it could turn magi, just like it did to Judal.

She ignored the older magic of the ancients instead of the dark, avoided their call warily as if she would be stung for the repercussions. The black rukh's depravity as a young boy was all consuming and it had taken Yunan aback, watching her fuel that anger instead and turn it into...not anything brighter, but a sway, a blip on an imperfect record. Yunan saw the nightmares that obscured his vision for many long years and she had still thought the best of them all, no matter what, and her influence on black rukh was what both swayed him and the other two from attempting to change her. In fact, they would never dare to try: he was jealous, in a way.

And that was where the line was drawn. Yunan settled back into place, the rukh around him fluttering harmlessly, and Java shuffled her feet in anticipation. They both felt unsettled, but not exactly by the other's presence. Java's eyes softened around the edges, turning to face Yunan instead of the fog.

 _"No empress?" Java blinked once, and for a second he caught a flash of unadulterated fear. She put a hand to her head, laughing nervously. "Oh dear, I seem to have misspoken. Right, I meant emperor."_

 _Yunan caught her reaction, gaze sharpening. "I've heard from Judal that you can hear the rukh," he told her, and immediately Java grew rigid so that even he himself grew alarmed._

 _"...Yeah," she replied, wary. "I can."_

 _"The Great Flow defines the implementation of fate to this world," Yunan continued, eyes blazing into her like brands. "If you can hear the rukh, then you can hear fate itself speak."_

 _"I cannot tell the future," Java bit back bitterly. "...They can, however, tell me abnormalities. Whispers of strange events, branching off from the timeline in ways that shouldn't be allowed." She waved a hand. "It was only once. They misspoke, and I forgot."_

 _"The rukh cannot make mistakes," Yunan prodded, and vibrant, enraged golden eyes turned to him._

 _"The rukh were all once human beings," she murmured. "Do not put them on a pedestal, for the dead cannot do many things. It is up to those that are still alive to finish the job."_

"The black rukh is not evil. It is greedy, and it feeds on negative emotions so that its sole purpose in overtaking the world is complete," she explained readily. "That is its primary existence. That is the whole point of having rukh exist in the first place: with it, you will never be alone in your experience." Her hands slowly shifted together. "Memories that the rukh departed, spells that were long lost to time, faces that are remembered like family even if you've never met them in your life: I see different things in every last one of these souls. It's easy to forget they're human, sometimes, because they're so attuned to the Flow."

"And those souls crying for the damned, they'll always be remembered that way even in death." She furrowed her brows, frustrated.

And Yunan felt himself start because with her words it all clicked together, rukh still hidden by fog yet ever-present around them. The rukh behind her, the nothing (no, they were something, they had always been there what how did he ever miss seeing them cluster behind her), seemed to laugh alongside their keeper as well.

"Just because they do not know of the degradation of evolution doesn't mean it is not their fault," Yunan reminded her softly. "The black rukh is everything against what Fate stands for. If we did not have the white rukh then time would no longer pass. We would become nothing. This is why I am so wary of the black rukh, because they can never turn back."

And it still made sense because there she stood, that void (no, the Old World) turning over and over in his thoughts, the most incomprehensible look on her face as her very existence contradicted his being. Yunan felt a long, longing envy running through his veins, to reach out and let that silver light infuse within him, because he had lived so long without feeling whole and this completeness was everything he had ever wished for.

Then Java sighed. "I hate it when you're right, even though you're such a sensitive wuss."

Yunan spluttered. Java guffawed. And admist the steady fog in the shadows of the Dark Continent, a light stood tall.

With a swirl of his wooden staff, Yunan brought a fold of rukh together in front of them, light caving its way into a slight tear in the fabric of space. The next event was waiting for her, and while it was not essential they both wanted to fulfill their purpose. He beckons her forward.

"Shall we?" He says, gaze meeting hers head on, and she walks through the gap without a second of hesitation.

"You know, I've never liked the idea of fate," Java said after a moment. Yunan looked horrified. The birds above him rippled, almost as if they were offended. "Hey! Don't give me that look! I never said I enjoyed it. It's just not practical."

Balbadd comes up in a cacophony of light and color, bustling men and women and children who led themselves into crowded markets and bartered with enthusiasm. The rukh fluttered against her lids, and she frowned as she brushed them away. It's been happening more and more recently, their strange aggravation.

She side-eyes Yunan as he comes up behind her like a second shadow. He glances at her in return. The rukh follows.

Morgiana's vision is there. She knows it is the Fanalis girl, she'd seen the magoi and the bright beacon of fuschia curtaining behind her, just like how she saw the end and Aladdin and the Dark Continent, and she thinks now that if her mind goes too far out then it will not return. She is afraid. The rukh takes and leaves nothing behind, and if she lets it then she will become part of the Flow, closer than any of the other magi. She would not a magi (she would never be a magi), but she would not be mortal anymore, either.

The nothing turns silver at her fingertips, and Yunan watches with some expression on his face - fear? anger? - and she remembers yet again that once upon a time, the world had no rukh, and instead it was a thin thread of string within everyone's hearts that remained invisible to the eye. When Solomon died, he took that world with him, and she knows that although this world is beautiful it is too black-and-white to her liking. Once upon a time, these people who came together had come together because Solomon gave them reason. Purpose. This world has never known it.

The world was always less about fate and more about the future. Something to change and something that always moved, whether or not anyone wanted it to. All the rukh here was white (the color of a blank slate, the color of innocence), and she saw fault in that as well.

Looking towards the future is important, and it always has been, but the people in this world trusted far too much in it. The past and the present, what of them? Java knew that if the world focused too much on the future, the past would be forgotten, just as how they continue to fault the black rukh for being too strong.

Sinbad was a strange anomaly, one that she wished she had never thought of. He reveled in the past, he wished hard for the future, and in the end, he could only manage a strange half of a whole, two parts that would not merge no matter how hard he tried, for he never did.

She would not influence this world's ways. The magi were already important pieces to this chessboard, and stunting them would only harm their reputation. She would remain silver, only a tiny sliver of the Old World, but she would let the rukh run on its own, even if it called for her to fix them, fix this problem, it was not like this a long time ago. She did not want to ruin this world of what it has grown so used to, for it would tear apart the foundation it lay upon.

She held two hands up to her face, cupping her hands and enhancing her vision to astronomical levels. She could do it, couldn't she? Yunan follows her line of sight and notices for the first time a black spot in the distance. He tenses, then relaxes.

(She could handle this one.)

"Ready to go?" He asked, arms spread in a carefree manner. Java is already running forward: she could see the black rukh reaching forward like an all-consuming rage.

Ill Ilah alone could destroy the entire planet: she had seen it being done before. It moved like a snake: the dark, broiling fury of rukh that encased the ground and cut through men in sharp spikes, destroying anything it touched. The god killer.

The borg lanced up like a sword, and the tendrils halted in place, just before its perimeter. She glanced down at the people who were attracting its ire. The people (men, slaves, and these people cared for none of them) hadn't turned toward them yet, but she could see the rukh beginning to fly in harsher, more staccato movements, passing through the crowd to taunt them onward. Java pointed upwards, signaling higher, go higher, and Yunan's borg expanded accordingly as she jumped upon its physical barrier.

She glances down below, past the borg, and realizes that yes, the magi was still there: Yunan had his eyes trained on her. She bit back a smile and felt her rukh calm down at the magi's touch, settling into nonchalance once again. As her gaze traveled to one of Kou's many dark advisors wavering in the distance her hands caught light and the slave driver's head finally turned to her. There was a split second as he saw her eyes flash with a calculating observance that had gone as soon as it appeared, and when she drew back to let the sun blind him-

Java checked the sky: the sun sat high above them, burning rays beating down like a rain of arrows.

All of them, they were all in such terrible health. She could see how badly they were malnourished to the brink of death: every bone was outlined on their faces, a weariness pulling them down. They were walking skeletons, tumbling against each other and shuffling scarred, stumbling feet. She noticed one particular boy in the end: he couldn't have been older than six, and yet there he was. She could see death so clearly that she felt prickles of fear running down her back: these were the eyes of men who'd experienced enough agony to become used to it, those who have already given up and now can only walk.

But then consciousness rolled in back of her mind and she jerked back to grab the handle, wrench it out of his hand, and slam it into the ground. The slave driver was sent sprawling on the cobble, surprised by the amount of distance she'd crossed in a matter of seconds. She bared her teeth, and the slaves shifted uneasily.

 _"Go back home."_ Terrified, the man scrambled away on his hands. Her wrist moved, and all eyes fell upon her waving right hand as it grasped light and pulled.

The nightmare ended, and all that was left were the terrified faces of those who had witnessed the devil. They were afraid of her and the illusion when it'd broken free, she could see it through the rukh: although the intensity had lessened, the birds they were engulfed in remained dark and boiling. She began the meticulous task of breaking open shackle by shackle, both hands and feet. In each palm she placed her hand to grasp, whatever warmth she had left, as if that would be enough to express her care.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry you had to experience this."

"Thank you," one of the now-free men spoke, hands trembling. "Thank you. We owe you a life of service." Yunan stood by with a somber expression, grip tight on the staff until his knuckles turned white.

She declined. They watched the proceedings tiredly: with the families they could not find they had instead found comfort in each other, and although she was assured of their ability to find new homes she was reminded terribly of her own isolation. That was a future that she could not partake in, for there were shadows that shook thunder and screamed of the dead.

(The rukh above her swirled. It was not right, they told her, and she knew it too, but she'd be damned if she ruined this world of what it had. So she clamped her mouth shut and listened.)

But her mind drifted at times and she had dreams, dreams that she craved with all her heart because they were _beautiful._ The soft lull of voices, the warm blankets and caressing hands that always brushed her hair back every night. She wanted them so badly that she'd shut her eyes and will herself away, away from the unfamiliar discordant sounds and the broken remainders of the rukh that had split in two.

 _(She reminded herself that once upon a time, she had lived something close to this before, thousands of similar lives of dirty halls and shattered men and other things that she had nearly forgotten because these memories, were they hers? Theirs? She didn't remember.)_

She closed her eyes now, dreaming of visions. There were swirling dancers and wonderful lights, lanterns glowing bright in the darkness of nightfall. It was a fantastic place, full of laughter and success and beauty. The moon glowed brightly, the full face burning into her memories as she has done countless times, and she was reminded of blood and screaming every time she blinked. She was drunk off its moonlight, and when she looked away she was blind.

The rukh fluttered, howling its rage. She could see faces pitch black, gaze ashen, and would eventually look away as her head throbbed. Most of the time she strayed from the roadways and walked on rooftops instead. She'd see things that nobody would search for; stray animals shifting in corners, trash rustling, but once in a while she'd come across a human who'd been in the wrong place. It echoed differently, tampering with the rush of adrenaline that said _get up, run, help._

Her eyes flickered, now dim. The world had too many struggles for one person to handle, and by god, wasn't that a terrifying thought?

"It's over. We don't have to stay anymore," Yunan told her.

"I don't want to walk," she responded evenly, and there was silence after that.

She'd seen the eyes of worser men: there was no ferocity or fire in their eyes but a cold, detached look, one that you'd see if they were looking at a piece of meat at a store. She'd seen it time and time again in slave owners across continents. They forgot the people themselves, forgot their emotions, their struggles and similarities, and remembered only that they owned it. If it was not satisfactory, then it was easier to just kill it. They looked at slaves the way men looked at insects.

Once she had shivered under that look. But that was a long time ago, and since then she had realized that her terror was misplaced. Slave owners, she had learned, held hatred close to their hearts, because otherwise guilt and shame would tear them apart. The most memorable eyes were not ones that instilled fear, but strength. They were the worst.

The darkest-colored souls spoke of hatred, of rage, and they never stopped in their urge to kill, maim, destroy. It hurt to watch. It hurt to listen.

Yet there were also humans overflowing with confidence and compassion, with a will so persuasive that she could follow their every word: the white rukh spoke false truths. They were not what she wanted, either. There was an importance in her decisions that she must acknowledge, both good decisions and the mistakes, for what else could do both other than a human?

Once upon a time, she had seen a golden tree like the beginnings of a universe. Flecks of silver whirled about like magnetic sparks as she shook asunder, and when leaves caught the light they shone like small gems. That vision had put that kaleidoscope of color among the multitude of worlds, all shattered in an instant. That is what the rukh reminded her of: leaves, colors, and the beauty of it that swirled around them like golden butterflies.

Energy resided even in the hollow of her bones. Around her, rukh flowed freely, reaching even past the tops of the trees, and each individual bird dipped and rose to the others. Java always felt heat along the back of her neck whenever she felt their energy, so far above her and flowing like a churning river that would not stop at even a magi's bidding. Her soul called out to it, and by the way her companion's heart tugged forward as well, he could feel it too.

Java struggled to stay awake as the moon died out. The air still smelled of smoke and pine needles, and the layer of soot blackening the ground did nothing to stain the embers of the fire that had been lit nearby. They sat together in an empty place as if like statues. She brushed leaves off herself.

"Goodnight, Yunan."

His eyes, which had closed shut previously, watched her as she ascended the tall pine, jumping from branch to branch, and Java reached a point where she could see a panoramic view.

She closed her eyes. The sky showed nothing but clouds now, and higher winds made her eyes dry. Carefully she wrapped into herself. The night bugs sang.

* * *

I stole some of my best quotes from the stuff I've already written. If you do want to read the old version (which I don't recommend haha), you can find it under the name "Of Lives and Losses."

I'm keeping it up mainly as a reminder to myself, and to show the improvement.

see ya later dudes


	3. Chapter 3

im not very good at multitasking when it comes to writing

* * *

Chapter 3

There was blood, there was death, there was rage.

War bloomed in long, terrifying bursts as gods rampaged across the lands. At the same time, humans became particularly observant: they kept watch with narrowed eyes and sharper senses, incredibly reliant on what remainder they had of their intuition. A sixth sense. Java kept her gaze attached to the beasts roaming above them, curious as to their nature.

"What do they see up there with their divine sight?" Java remembered asking. They were made painfully aware of their inferior race from the beginning of time, and so they had grown up this way: running, running, far and few in between as they hid in their struggle to survive, their competitors uncaring as to the plights of those crushed underneath their feet. Blood flowed in rivers around one of the fallen, tremors shaking from the earthquake the body created, and yet she kept her eyes trained on the skies above. "What use do they have for all the gifts in the world other than using it to destroy others?"

Years ago, they had eventually learned to see while also sensing whether or not danger was coming. Maybe it was from the anticipation. Wrapping the wounded with bandages and medical herbs, Java finally leaned back to stare directly into the storm, not wavering in disgust or awe. Was it strange to be this indifferent when they had all been grown into it their entire lives? They were weak. That was a fact.

She had wondered for a period of time how they could fight creatures that could see farther, swim better, arm themselves with sharper weapons made of tooth and claw and everything in between so that they stood a fighting chance for once. And for a long time she had found outrage: anger for herself, rage for their plight, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths of their people as these gods found no pity for the young. There was blood, there was death, there was rage. Java was far angrier than she would like to say, and so she shut her emotions behind an iron cage and continued to keep a lookout over the remaining survivors left.

"It's not the other races that I hate, although they have murdered plenty," she admitted to an empty shell of a man next to her as she had patched him up, slumbering away peacefully as he remained unconscious. His bag lay askance beside him, its contents examined for any further scavenged medical supplies. "Has it always been this way? This fighting? I can't remember."

They had always looked to the skies, she knew that. The constellations were wide and spread far, bright pinpricks of light that formed lines in the universe, maps that guided the way to any traveler. And then the beasts came so that they no longer looked up in search for stars but for wings, shadows, towering above them and blocking out the sun. When had looking up become synonymous to fear? Java scratched at the moss growing along the cavern wall, shattered rock cool to the touch. It was hard to care when the world was so indifferent.

They carried on. Wounds were healed, lost limbs replaced, and of those renowned for their gifts and splendor, Java met with cold eyes and a shrug of the shoulders. What use was it to be a monarch of ants? There was always someone better, stronger, turning all their strengths into laughable contempt. Great minds were nothing when a blast to the head could destroy it in an instant.

Solomon was an unearthly appearance, with wild hair and the deepest blue eyes that Java had ever seen. She sat with her legs drawn up to her chest, but she soon shifted to the balls of her feet, placing one hand solid on the ground. A strange cold feeling washed over her. It was fear, she realized. None of them had ever noticed the man's recklessness. When she looked at them now, Ill Ilah's gift of magic granted upon the human race and their eyes shuttered to their mortality, she shivered with terror. This was the weapon they had craved, and this scared Java the most: with great power came great arrogance. Al Thamen grew stronger and their forces were cruel.

The bags under the man's eyes beside her were arguably less prominent, but she watches him with a careful eye anyway as she rearranges the blankets laid askew. She had found him nearly dead on the side of the road. Near casualty. Long slashes across the chest. He'd lost a lot of blood.

Sometimes, she glanced far off into the distance, eyes straining to see even a glimpse of the unknown. Magic was a constant force that had not always been one, but some adapted to it like fish in water: she envied that. There were moments during her respite where she became half-conscious. She could open blurry eyes in the rukh but see only murky visions, barely coherent of the shifting masses hovering above her. She could hear a woman singing. The rukh rode in waves calmly about, and Java wondered if they had heard her message.

Left to themselves, men toiled in their own restlessness, finding ways to distract or waste if need be. They hustled about under the rukh's jurisdiction, heads down, refusing to meet each others' eyes for the sake of their own lives. The magi's eyes confiscated the innocence of this town for self-preservation, and black rukh rode in waves eagerly to drink it all in. She wished she had never known rukh. Magic before then had been simpler, easier to love and to understand.

The oppressed became the oppressors and the beasts grew ill, controlled, forced into compact structures where their bodies ran until they gave out. Even with all their wings and claws and talons they could not stop the nightmares that came burrowing deep into their heads, screwing with their vision and dumbing them down to rocks. It stung. The people who prided themselves on being right, being humane (humans, she sneered, those fools), ended in chaos and stupidity and weapons that had no weaknesses other than blind arrogance. Black seeped into her skin, crawling through her veins like dark tendrils. She choked on blood. The blade felt warm in her red-streaked hand.

As she scanned the buildings one last time a glint of white caught the corner of her eye. A white flag was hoisted up, flittering faintly in the wind like a final wave goodbye. Java's breath quickened in anticipation and she leaned up higher, crawling out of the den a bit to get a closer view. There - it shone like a beacon, guiding black rukh toward the source, but when it reached the flag they jerked back as if stung. She leapt up in a rush, her giddiness returning. Was it possible that there was-

She could not discern if the figure were male or female because of the cloak covering their head and body, though she could see flecks of rukh, the influence of magoi surrounding them. There was an aura of power that Java found achingly similar, radiating confidence and the promise of change. She stepped forward with one foot and twisted around, reaching up into the air, pulling down as if dragging something. Slowly, the borg broke down.

The light was infectious, it covered everything.

"Here!" She shouted, and the figure turned-

All at once, three beasts appeared from the underbrush, zeroing in. Guards, of course they had to be guards. She rose one hand and a trail of rukh bent toward her as if she were plucking a string, and one single white bird fluttered down like a leaf to settle at her finger.

Leave, it spoke. Go home.

And like that, the black rukh turned silver.

The beasts stopped moving toward the clearing, recognition appearing in their gazes as their bodies began to move on their control once more. Their eyes focused on Java with intense, surprising clarity: then, they turned and disappeared into the forest, away from the nearby housing of one of the Staves. Their mind control was broken.

Java had not expected many targets to move unnoticed, and so to save her magoi she reduced her span on the rukh to the size of her own borg. Al Thamen flags rose ominously like the black dawn, staining the ground in shadow with the effect of its mirage. Even the rukh around her was being affected: they turned dark grey at the edges, like pale halos around dark clouds. She stepped back, rukh fluttering in agitation, before backing away and hiding herself with magoi. The figure had stopped a few meters away, stock still.

"Psst!" She whispered. "Hey, they're gone. Hurry up and start walking over here, y-"

Drawing a hand over their hood, the figure drew back their hood. Eyes wide with shock, the great leader Solomon stared back at her, mouth half agape. Java's speech cut short as she froze.

"Oh," he said.

And then Java woke up.

Java jerked awake before she remembered her own reply, blinking sleep out of her eyes as she shook her head. It was early morning, and she hadn't slept much: the sun was just peeking through the low clouds and the horizon, grey-blue sky with the hint of light. Yunan was long gone. She was still up high in a tree, and as she gazed downward she realized how close she had been to falling off. "Ugh," she muttered, passing a hand over her face when her feet made contact with solid dirt.

Those of the departed and depraved could not return to the great flow of white rukh, she thought, the recitation replaying in her mind. She could not change the minds of those who were already dead, for they were not sentient creatures. That is what all the magi were taught, what all the magicians believed, since that was all they could comprehend of Ill Ilah's legacy. And she'd believed it too, once.

But once the white being became black and it began to destroy what it had created, she had realized how its corruption worked: it was either the first or the second. To give life, or to take it. Before even magic had been a constant, there was no such polarization in their memory. She had loved freely and with emotion. Ill Ilah took that.

In her mind, silver drew humanity, and the world has never needed it as much as it did now.

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its over 9000

I've heard about the more recent chapters of the manga that seems wild dude

Also thanks Ava-001 holy shit I think I've seen you in my old writing before maybe? I'm glad you're liking this one so far, I'll probably keep going with this if I can keep up with this plot because god i do go rushing in without a plan

see ya


	4. Chapter 4

im tired

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Chapter 4

The storytellers weep.

She's had little experience with such affairs in the brief attempts of humoring the young and the forgetful, tales of the beasts and the nine-tailed foxes, river creatures and the faeries. She listened every time, it was to her nature: it was a way to pass time and to ignore the outside pockets of brilliant supernovas melting stars and burning men. So Java stopped. She listened.

And in the brief passing moments that these people spoke, time stopped momentarily. All seemed right in the world. And she stared out at the rukh swirling abovehead for the millionth time, waiting for that answer that never came but what she already knew, she saw a glimpse what Solomon had always wanted her to see, what she had needed to understand but couldn't, why she felt so lost and separated in the end while the rest of them moved on without her.

It was beautiful, this lie, and Java wanted so hard to believe it.

But she saw its faults and the troublesome chinks in its armor, the way it had men drawing too close for a glimpse of power, of glory, to see what the rukh provided and manipulate it as theirs. The universe did not care for these specks of sand in the hourglass: they would remain insignificant. The illusion was far crueler than the cold truth, twinkling down at them in sanguine, mocking laughter.

So she decided to get up from her spot and begin walking away, far from humanity and far from the fake lights and the empty holes in the night, searching far for something within herself that she could maintain and manage to keep up even for a brief time. Because that, to her, meant hope.

In the middle of a small clearing, crouched next to one of those old shingled-roof wells, there was a girl who lay her head down and slept. The evening smelled like foliage and mist. There was a man in this house. Through the cracks in the bricks he could see the sky beyond his walls and cried tears in joy. There was an old, withered man, eye blind but roving, searching for the things he could see that nobody else could dare to try.

The river runs.

Java glanced down at her skin, fingers outstretched and grasping at nothing, warm and humming with magic that she believed in at the very core of her being. Magic, she decided, was not biased. It did not care nor separate itself for anyone: it was the maker who changed what its purpose would be. Its law was intrinsic, and above all else it felt real. She knew now why magicians had dedicated their practice with wands rather than rukh: they could study themselves far better than they could ever understand what the rukh was.

And just like that, she looked at herself and realized that no, nothing was wrong anymore. She had found her truth.

Why, she had screamed into the nothing, was she so different than the others? She was never alone, she was with the very rukh she despised, but it felt as if a wall had come between her and the rest of humanity with her realization. The rukh smiled down in peace.

"Let me be who I am and seek not to alter me."

Java was not a god, not even remotely, but there was something that made her hold ground to her roots: they trembled as the ground they made foundations on crumbled apart, but the tree already stood strong and did not crumble with it. Was it her emotion that struck her? Her trust? She did not know anymore, and she found that she did not care. If this was her role in this universe, then so be it.

She did not change the world, and in turn, the world did not change her.

And with that, she let go of her distrust and let the rukh consume her with determination, neither confronting nor accepting. The rukh seemed to nod pleasantly, as if this were all foreseen and her prophecy was fated. They thrummed around her, caressing carefully but never overstepping the lines she'd drawn. Java's breath slowed.

"No," she began, pulling back. They followed after, adoring. "No, I can't, I am not your savior, I cannot return you to who you were anymore."

But they stared back, patiently waiting, wings beating in tune, synchronized in an eerily beautiful way, and the gods of the afterlife must be screeching with amusement because she could hear these people reply, " _yes."_

"There are two problems with that," Java spluttered. "One, I don't know how. Two, I made Solomon a promise and if he comes back from the dead just to take me along with him then I'm screwed and it's not gonna be pretty to see me with fifty spears shoved through my head. Three, wait I got a third one, three, that directly interferes with my moral ethics because I'm sure as hell not qualified to tamper with lives and memories and shamble them back together in the hopes that something will stick. I'm not the advocate for the rukh, but that doesn't mean I won't get shit for screwing it up."

They fluttered obediently.

"Screw you all," she said, and like any sensible and mature adult would she turned her back on them and marched off further into the forest without a care for if they followed her or not. (And, judging by the sound of trickling water and bells sounding after her, they were most definitely on her trail). "Whatever!"

Whether they liked it or not, she was going to avoid any human interaction preferably for the rest of her life after this, let Sinbad and Aladdin and whoever else deal with that Kou lady empress' bullshit because she was not about to go poking that hornet's nest for fun. _And she knew, in the back of her head, that if she caved in and acquiesced to their wishes then she would stop Ill Ilah's return guaranteed and nothing worse would have to happen to these people who knew so little and deserved none of the terrors of the Old World._

She was starting to get really sentimental about this. The rukh spilled that trail of what looked like fairy sparkles before circling her head again and Java looked up impassionately as she was met face first with that shimmering dust.

"Why the fuck do incorporeal life forms drop what looks like baby powder mixed with rainbows everywhere," she muttered to what a normal person would assume was an empty sky blockaded by trees. The rukh made a wave motion in what appeared to be a human shrug, and Java wondered how in the hell a bunch of birds moved so flawlessly like a hivemind. She was sure they weren't a hivemind. They were close, though.

She was way too tired to handle these bullheaded butterflies for more than the ten minutes she'd given them and so avoided speaking to them for the rest of the afternoon, muttering to herself as she slapped at bushes and blinked slowly at herbs she recognized from god knows where.

 _Once upon a time, she'd been a scholar, a writer, an herbalist, a seer. A fighter. A killer. A king._

A lie, she told herself, but nothing responded to her to say no, so she fell silent in her head again and wondered if that spot of dirt had always been under her fingernail or not.

She slept for days. It was the best way to pass the time, and she found that distracting herself was best if she didn't stop to think at all. The magic creatures were long gone already, dead along with the past they came from, but she found hints of them in the descendants here: the wildlife bloomed rukh into the earth, the ones humans could use to replenish their magoi. The foxes hinted at the corners of their vision, shaking two, or three, or four tails mischievously. Birds with six wings swooped down, feathers streaming behind them in bursts of color, cooing as they paused overhead.

"I gotta admit, they did a good job with this world," she admitted to nobody, slumped over with her back to an old oak tree. The civilians had strung up glass pieces and dusty bottles stoppered by wooden corks on its branches, swinging in the breeze and creating music that Java appreciated. A fox ran up to her and lay its head in her lap, and Java shoved it off with a scowl.

"Shut up I am not your god!" She yelled again up at the rukh, who had seemed to try and make it easier for her by pairing up with a mass of black rukh and heading toward her in an ominous cloud of gray. They stopped, hovered, and backtracked a bit, scolded by her words.

"Nooo," she mourned as mist materialized next to her tree and she spotted the markings of Al Thamen on the man who appeared before her. "Now I have to get up again, this is all your fault!"

The rukh had the slightest decency to look sheepish.

The dark magician in question raised his staff and released a torrent of soundwaves, disrupting Java's attempt to have a quiet afternoon in solitude. She got up and ran, clapping her hands over her ears on the way.

"What the fuck dude!" She shrieked over the high-pitched sound, directed mostly towards the heavily-veiled man. He looked like some sort of dark bride. Or possibly dressed for a funeral. Either way his fashion sense was terrible and, frankly, outdated. "Y'all are a menace to society, really, there are gonna be quite a few noise complaints!"

" _You will come to obey Ill Ilah's will,"_ the man replied, voice far too deep for comfort and ominous. She could hear multiple voices overlapping his own, as if he were carrying multiple people within him and they were all straining to speak.

"Ill Ilah can go suck it!" Java ducked under a hollowed trunk and crawled inside. With a couple shoves against the top, the trunk split in half.

The man didn't seem to be running after her: instead, he was gliding, robes swishing as he headed toward her with the speed of an incoming tsunami. She pulled on her own magic and-

The ground literally broke underneath her as she released and the entire ocean shot her skyward due to the rukh's assistance and the force it created. "Guys, literally! Stop interfering!"

The rukh flew after her as she rocketed away from the trees and flew several hundreds of miles out past the forest. She was nearing the shoreline, she realized, coasting on top of that torrent of water on her makeshift board. "If I don't manage to land properly and end up dying I will come for each of your souls," she monotoned, reaching imminent doom as the ground rushed to meet her.

At the last second her fall was stopped by an overgrowth of leaves and vines. They bent flexibly under the tree's weight, creating a small crater in her wake, and she tumbled off in a rush as her head jerked about wildly.

" _No,"_ she said one last time to the rukh, and she stumbled away into the woods again likely having a bad concussion.

The next day was a blur. She vaguely remembered walking into a village, hair covering half her face and rukh trailing after her like a long string of golden petals. She had slammed into a wall, demanded to know where the farthest place from society was, realized that she was in fact in a place where society resided, then fell into an existential crisis as she was dragged away by a pair of shady-looking miscreants into a barn somewhere. She also remembered a distinctly bad feeling passing over her, but other than that nothing happened.

She'd woken up the next day feeling midly rested but with a bad headache, and as soon as she'd stepped out the door she met a group of shocked-looking native villagers.

"Well, I guess I haven't been thought of as elfin before," she mused half-thoughtfully, having been whisked away and sat down and redressed into something she definitely did not recognize but was rather surprised by. The cloth was well-made, well-tailored to fit, made of silks softer than anything she's ever worn before and woven with intricate shades of thread. She felt rather like a decoration at the moment, which while she appreciated she did not enjoy the stiff feeling of as she could not move about as freely with all the fabric in the way.

"Do I have to pay for this?" She added as an afterthought, holding up one of the sleeves with her arm. "I appreciate the new look, it's great and all, but honestly if my old ones were just washed and everything I'd be just as fine."

The villagers who had brought her into a room to fit her in the outfit stared at her as if uncomprehending. One of them raised his fingers and put them to his mouth, no voice coming out but following the movement of her mouth as if trying to understand what she was saying. "Oh," she said, arm falling. "Different language, I guess."

Then she frowned. "No, the New World has a universal language, I know that. The Old World was supposed to fix that problem, what happened here..."

Then she shrugged. "Well, not my issue."

She walked out of the room, bunching the silks up around her knees so that she wouldn't trip over them and fall flat on her face. The villagers acted a lot like the rukh did, clustering around her in the vague attempts to assist. "Jeez, do you all really treat strangers like this? Don't know why there aren't more tourists around here," she remarked as one of them tied the clothing back in a way that still made her look elegant. She scratched her head to remove an itch and promptly tangled her hair up even more, ruining the image. "But then again, you'd probably be out of money if not for that, so kudos to you."

They haven't spoken a word to her since she'd finally come to, and she found that she barely recalled the previous night. She'd been asleep somewhere with a lot of hay. A barn. A loft somewhere? There were no animals in the vicinity, she didn't remember seeing a single one, was this even a farming village?

"Where the hell am I?" She finally asked herself, stopping entirely. The villagers stopped with her, unsure-looking. "Also, this seems really suspicious to me, I feel like I'm being sent to the slaughter with the clothes and everything..."

She glanced purposefully at the people behind her, hoping maybe one of them would understand what she was saying and answer her. Five blank stares met hers. "I give up," she sighed, throwing her hands into the air. "I'll look for myself."

She went around, throwing open various doors in the hopes of catching someone in the act of setting up a cauldron to boil her alive. She saw a mother, two children, several elderly people, a girl sobbing, and with every house passed she felt her hope dwindling. "Goddamn people can't make up their minds," she grumbled.

There was a strange lack of food in each house as well, she thought, looking about. There were no crops growing despite the plentiful forest around them, they had a substantial amount of water, but one thing that was common was how all the men were suspiciously absent from their homes. "Were there any adult men in this village in the first place?" She thought, then shook her head. "That's bullshit. There has to be. They're probably out working or something."

One of the villagers came up to her and began urgently pulling at the fabric of Java's sleeve. It was a young woman, dressed in mundane robes and a turban wrapped around her head to cover her hair. She pointed vaguely in a specific direction and began to pull her forward, urging her on. "Alright, sheesh, I'm coming," Java replied, starting to walk.

It was same place she'd slept the night before. Java pushed the door open with a resounding _creak,_ but nothing inside stirred. The place was empty. "Why am I-" She was about to ask, turning around, but realized the woman had already fled and nobody was around anymore. She peeked her head outside. They were standing, shivering and fearful of what was inside the barn.

"Alllright," she said, stepping back inside as if nothing was wrong, "I guess I'm the exorcist now."

She spent several minutes poking around under hay bales, in stables, on the loft, and even resorted to checking the ceiling by standing on the wooden supports creaking high above the ground. "There's nothing here," she shouted at the hay, but still there was no secret demon to slay and conquer. "Alright, come, you," she said, pointing at the same woman who'd pulled her earlier. The woman shuddered and sobbed, shaking her head, but Java pushed her inside and showed her the empty barn. "See! Nothing wrong."

The woman had crumpled to her feet and was now writhing heavily on the floor, foaming at the mouth. The whites of her eyes were showing. "Okay, now you're just being melodramatic," Java sighed, shoving her back out the door. "Nevermind, get out of the way."

She hadn't realized until now, she'd thought it was because of the migraine, but she now felt something unfamiliar and cold inside this place. It desperately grasped onto her, wanting to pull her down with it into the forgotten and unknown, hoping that she would drown in it until she became exactly like it. It had been attempting to attack her this whole time, she understood, but she just didn't notice until now.

"Fine," she said, and the rukh jumped at the chance like an eagerly awaiting puppy. She outstretched her fingers, and with an upsurge of magoi the barn was purified by a dazzling amount of white light as it filled the entire room and shattered the illusion encasing it.

"Well, that's solved," she said to nobody as the exploded remnants of the barn lay scattered and charred around her. Underneath the hay many the remaining tired and bewildered villagers, and along with them were mountains of fruit and crops and other offerings made that had suddenly reappeared along with the men. "No idea whose choice this was to make a barn in the middle of nowhere and terrorize a bunch of villagers, but here we are thank you very much and goodbye. I'll be keeping the clothes, I guess."

But then she was mobbed by a horde of crying women and children who carried her up as the men started thanking her profusely in their unknown tongue despite her nearly sending one of the women into a coma, and she decided to do the thing that she knew best before anything got out of hand: she picked up her clothes and hightailed it out of there.

(Years later there was a shrine to her name, revered as the one who'd killed the demon who'd captured their town and stole like a parasite. Java would not know it, but the nearby fishing villages would hear of her, and the travelers who could speak their languages would speak of her, and despite Java's best wishes and due to the actions she made afterward she would be sought out eventually as the greatest legend of all time.)

(And there, she would meet the man named Sinbad, the prince named Kouen, and the kings this world would come to know as their saviors.)

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its been a long day thank you for the review oof i didn't sleep yesterday and it's 10 PM again


	5. Chapter 5

ok ive been playing pokemon pearl nonstop which is why i stopped drawing too whoopsie my bad

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Chapter 5

Java had never thought much about it. The dreams she had, the worlds she'd observed, or why she seemed to remember things she shouldn't have so vividly. She didn't remember if she started off in the Old World at all, to tell the truth. There were the vaguest hints of a goddess, of red strings in the dark, of Yggdrasil's glowing leaves and rivers flowing upstream and backwards and to the ends of time. Dreams of the universe that had come to be, had always been, and forever will remain until the skies implode and the single star combines.

It was there, and she knew it, she was a world-hopper, she was a seer, a time traveler, and above all she did not belong. She remembered and she existed to remember. That was her purpose.

So she watched from afar, yearning, saw how these humans loved and nurtured and adored. And at the same time she was there, seeking out plants that she'd seen before in a different land, herbs that could be harvested and turned into a medicine for money. So that became her new job: recording plant properties, documenting leaves that could heal when used one way and kill with another, tasting apothecary on her skin and her hands staining with powders and dyes and all sorts of materials.

And so she set up a hut, easy for travelers to find but solitary in surroundings, led astray by faerie lights and glowing eyes and beasts that could destroy you in a single swipe. It was just a bit too close to the unknown, the Old World combining, and she was the path between the two.

People came to her, quite often actually: an old woman, searching for plants that could heal her ailing son. A young man looking for something to get rid of the phantom pain in his arm. Young children lost from home, a couple who wanted a source of good luck for their unborn child, a monk for a talisman, and requests that varied in size and difficulty. There were travelers from across the globe. There were those from the village just several miles away. Each of them left with what they had requested, and her renowned talent grew.

She called the forest Ithersta.

"What does that name mean?" One of the village children had asked, arms full of bundles of medicines and poultices. The boy had been sent on errands, but Java still thought him to be much too young to travel alone (too young, where are the others, hunger has taken them all.) She strains to speak.

"It is known as the Second Reality," she replies, envisioning the sights further than they could dream of comprehending, the rukh was the most obvious of that list. They were aware of it, sometimes and just barely, and when enough of them piled up it was physically corporeal and visible to the human eye. It was a bit scary how they worshipped the things they could not see, even when they relied on it for multiple reasons. "Time in this realm comes to a standstill, and at the same time it is at the whims of the inhabitants. There, time is a construct, not a statement of truth, manipulated at will and controlled only when it pleases."

She looked into the child's eyes, and oh how brightly they shined back, curiosity and understanding looking into her at once, and the boy smiled as if that was all the answer he'd ever needed.

In every reality she faced, time was the bane of existence. Time was what stole life from the old, crumbled what was once new, collapsed red dwarfs and suns and stars and galaxies until they were cold and unyielding, where nothing grew again. Their people sought its power, but at the same time it was a detestable occurrence, for if time only came to a standstill then the wealthy and the young and the prosperous would stay forever while the world bent to their flimsy spirits.

Traveling back in time? It was a good thought, but in reality it stripped away the laws of the gods and forced through small paradoxes that ate away at each other until it ripped large holes in the fabric of timelines, and as the cities screamed and worlds burned those sinners who had taken the forbidden fruit gazed up at the sky and cursed time, one last time, for enticing them with this insatiable urge to fix their mistakes.

It was the young that experienced the world as they were truly supposed to do, the old a bit more jaded but finally understanding, that philosophical lesson that Burke had told of the sublime. In the face of the universe, they were but specks, the individual snowflakes on the white peaks of the mountain encased with clouds. It was later at this point that men began to attempt an imbalance, to rewrite their importance as more or less valuable than others, and that was where societies crumbled.

It is not a terrible thing to be constant, she thought, waving goodbye as the boy left her house, stumbling over tree roots in his excitement. It was something to rely upon, something that every being both living and dead has to undertake. But Ithersta, it went beyond that, it took everything the world had hated and turned it into something new. The living tree creatures bent and bowed, pale feathers of flowers blooming and withering all at once, and that had become the norm for them because time was not something that they had relied upon. And so it had opened up to them in return.

In the kingdom of Ithersta, time reigned as equal to every other being in the universe. And Java felt relieved.

"You can always eat the petunias, but I swear if any of you start eating the cranberries I will destroy you," she barked at the foxes working their way into her garden. They glanced up, considered her words, then cautiously munched on the aforementioned flower instead of the fruit growing next to it.

Bottles, glass spheres of all sizes were lined up inside her house and along the windowsill. In them were herbs, leaves, berries, several jars of jam (it took a couple tries but she enjoyed the peaches), but above all else were the hourglasses meticulously crafted, every grain of sand collected and flipped again, once every morning and once at night. She'd never understood why hourglasses represented time (yes, it was a measuring device, but honestly she had more interest in clocks than watching particles fall over and over again), but maybe for irony, maybe to remind herself she kept them. They were trinkets at best.

Java was lucky enough to have caught a glimpse of several glowing creatures wandering the forest at rare moments. The fairies stared back at her with twinkling, translucent eyes, then vanished back into the depths. For them to show themselves in her territory made her heart swell with joy, for that meant peace for eons to come within the realm she'd made.

That must have been a fluke, however, because one day a man with indigo hair dressed like a king came crashing down her door and demanded that she come with the ragtag team trailing behind him, grinning brightly down at her.

Before realizing that Java had fallen on the floor blinking wildly at them.

"Uhh," was the first thing she said to them. Sinbad stared down at her, grin widening just a little bit.

"Oh, I apologize for the inconvenience, fair maiden, please, let me help you," he spoke not unkindly, assisting her as she got back on her feet. She smacked away a wandering hand (to his surprise as he yelped), looked at a wary Ja'far and Drakon and saw visions of their future, all tumbled into one and intermixing with the first reality. The second reality, although kind, gave her a hell of a migraine.

"We're looking for the woman who heals all and saved multiple villages across the continent," he said, searching around openly with an innocent gaze at the swinging chimes, the glass bottles, the hung up and drying plants. "I'm assuming she's out?"

"You're talking about me, dingus," she said, reaching up with one hand to swipe irritatingly at a lock of hair blown directly across her face. When she moved everything back into place she was met with the disbelieving gaze of the rest of Sinbad's crew. The Imuchakk had to bend down to fit in the hut, she realized, snorting a little when she saw him.

" _You're_ the legendary hero?" Ja'far said. He seemed entirely unconvinced. "The one that risked her life slaying the black djinns plaguing the towns?"

"...Yes," she replied, because honestly she'd forgotten that those djinns had even existed and she'd thought the thing was a demon. It felt soulless, inhuman. She had assumed all djinns came from the Old World, and yet she hoped that those spirits had not been transformed into those beasts because they were like Death itself. Almost like a Kamala. She wondered if that was what Ill Ilah felt like, too.

"I was imagining someone..." Sinbad was muttering to himself, but she could tell that he was thinking she should've been older, more mature-looking, and she would've agreed with him. But at the same time she simply shrugged, because this was the form that had been chosen and her appearance was only an illusion.

"The puppets dance and the strings are made," Java said, voice crackling as the wind began whistling around them. "I am but a figment of the gods, restlessness has placed me here, and whether or not the realities overlap each other I shall observe and save this world from its own destruction."

"...Okay," Ja'far said, throwing his hands up in the air as he exited her abode through the remains of her entrance that had been smashed to smithereens by Sinbad's carelessness. "I'm out."

She stared at the assassin's back as he started retreating, and with a casual voice addressed Sinbad, "why these people choose to follow you I will never understand, fisherman."

Sinbad could only blink before she was - how did she move so fast, did she even move - grabbed ahold of Ja'far, pulled everyone else with him, and they were not surrounded by deep woods anymore but rather the metropolis Sinbad had grown so accustomed to over the years.

They focused in on the girl who was looking around leisurely and now ignoring the group, looking interested in a stall that just so happened to be carrying fruits.

"Oh thank god cranberries were a universal thing and not just me imagining it," she groaned as she stuffed a bunch of them into her mouth. Ja'far didn't even have the decency to look disgusted at this point.

"Um," Sinbad said.

"My _ship,"_ the Imuchakk said, having more problems to think about than the girl who'd just teleported without blinking an eye. Which would make sense if she had a staff, or a wand, or a dungeon item, but what she did took literally half a second. Sinbad pinched himself just in case. "We left my ship behind, it took weeks to-"

"Got it, dude," she said, and with another flick of her hand the boat appeared out of nowhere and splashed half the people on the deck with a mighty wave of saltwater spray. Drakon coughed from where he stood, having taken a hint of the blast and cape drenched.

"...Oh," Hinahoho said, almost disbelieving, then bellowed in laughter as a fish flopped into his hands from the force of the tsunami.

Ja'far's mouth was opening and closing, but no words were coming out. Java tilted her head in confusion, then turned to Sinbad who was halfway to doing the same thing. Sinbad's jaw clamped shut.

"Even magicians require some sort of vessel to channel their power through," Ja'far stuttered, waving his hands, "and the output, the speed, there wasn't even any direction given to the rukh, how did you-"

Java glared at the rukh in silent warning as if to remind them of what happened the last time they tried to help. They fluttered anxiously but remained still. "I, uh," she fumbled, struggling to find a reasonable answer, "I told them with my mind."

"...Your mind."

"Yes. You see, I am a psychic and shouting commands like a squawking parrot seemed really unnecessary to me and besides, the rukh could hear me just fine, which is why you're all here now and not still in the forest in front of my house when you blew up my front door," Java answered, relieved she had come up with an answer. "Yeah, the second realities are where the rukh abides, and opening the door to communication is much easier if you've gone to the beyond."

Ja'far held his breath, spun around, and said brightly to Sinbad, "so she's clinically insane, good, that's fine, we should get going now."

Hinahoho had looked unsure at this point, still holding the fish, but at Ja'far's command he sighed and threw the fish back into the sea before retrieving his spear and heading off after them. Java was unsure whether Ja'far had given her incentive to follow after them or not, and the cranberries were still calling her name...

"Ahem," Ja'far said as he looked pointedly at her, and she scrambled to follow as they entered the palace doors.

"We've never asked for your name," Sinbad spoke again once they were settled into an awkwardly uncomfortable silence, Java glancing around at the elaborately decorated halls bedecked with jewels.

"I am the Almighty, the law of all worlds, the creator of universes, I am Time," she responded distractedly, watching the gardens that were being well tended to by several servants who soon noticed the group and cleared out of the way for their observation.

She looked up when the silence stretched too long and went back over her response to his question again. "Oh, right, you can call me Java."

Ja'far seemed like he wanted to slam his head against that wall judging by how hard he was staring at it. Drakon, who had long removed the dripping clothing tied around him, raised a claw to prevent a series of laugh-turned-coughs.

"Java," Ja'far tested cautiously, "why were you living up so far into the Dark Continent? The things that live there are not quite as friendly as the ones here, and Sindria has some pretty bad monsters."

She turned towards him to address him fully. "It's not dangerous at all," she exclaimed in surprise. "Maybe you just need to spend a little more time there. I promise you, the sights in Ithersta are beautiful! Have you seen the angels?" Java stopped to examine a vine. "Hmm, this one looks like it needs more water."

"And what exactly is Ithersta," she could hear Ja'far exclaim, exasperated.

"Where the rukh resides, of course," she said. They all fell silent again, and she wondered if that was a normal thing here, to suddenly run out of script to say for long periods of time. It was a very stilted conversation if so.

"Sinbad, I think you have several Kamalas following you," she declared after watching him and to get rid of the silence once again. Too much silence and the Kamalas start returning again. "They feed on sadness and fear, if you didn't know. They're deeper in than the second reality, but they're still very potent and they are manifestations of the own shadows you face. There is darkness within you, and you should probably look for a solution for that because to be honest it's not very healthy and once they decide to start feeding, well."

Each of the king's vessels turned slowly to her, and finally there was a dawning recognition in their eyes as her words registered. "Ah," Sinbad said, quieter, and the birds stopped humming.

"Knowing that there is a problem is the first step to solving it," Java declared, clapping him on the back (and dislodging one Kamala that had put a hand on his shoulder in the process, but she was sure Sinbad didn't notice.) "First step is down, so you're doing great."

"I don't understand anything anymore and I don't want to know," Ja'far decided, brushing his hands off and exiting the hall. They all turned to watch him round the corridor and disappear off into the distance.

"...Well, there goes a Kamala," Java said, seeing the dark tendrils of the shadowy figure trail after the advisor. "Anyway, while you do have some problems, that's nothing compared to the fifth reality. Oh, lord, that is a nightmare to behold. I'm not gonna go into that one."

"The rukh," Sinbad said, interest taking over him, "you were talking about the rukh, earlier. How can one see them in this...second reality?"

Java blinked. "I have no idea."

As the king twitched in an effort not to strangle her like Ja'far nearly had, Java threaded a chain of flowers that she'd plucked from the earth within mere seconds, each flower weaving itself into the circlet as it floated upward, interlocking itself and dropping into Java's waiting hands. Hinahoho was staring as she placed it on his head. "Here," she said, making a similar one out of daisies for Drakon's safekeeping. "You two seem like you're in for a handful. Good work, guys."

And she went merrily on her way, the two vessels in question in disjointed befuddlement as Sinbad ranted behind them. Drakon turned to Hinahoho, daisies planted on top of his shining scales to make quite the strange image.

"I want to quit," he said calmly, and Hinahoho's booming guffaws scared off a flock of birds resting above them.

* * *

She was waiting for something.

She didn't know what, yet, but as she continued sitting by the cliffside, peering down at the waves crashing over and over against the rock face, coral and sea foam and the air cool with the hint of salt, she looked up into the horizon and watched the sun set past the darkening waters.

The clouds were swirling abovehead, concentrated on a specific section of the island most likely for rain, preparing to turn silver-grey as the rukh flung themselves in wicked bursts of thunder and wind. The shadows, the concentrated amounts of black rukh, flew even higher than that, signaling that even in this place darkness remained visible, blocked out only by the force of Yamuraiha's magic and Sindria itself. There were misers watching, waiting.

"Yo," she heard an unfamiliar voice, and she saw a braid (long, dark hair and the flash of red) flickering as someone walked up and sat down heavily. She blinked, and swiveled toward him.

Judal looked younger than from what she remembered. Maybe it was because he hadn't suffered yet, gone through a series of events that would lead him to the void, where the Kamalas would turn on him and he was bereft of any of his magic. He seemed healthy, too: she'd never been sure whether he had any muscle due to how skinny he was, leaning toward lean rather than muscular, since he relied only on his wand and his sharp tongue. She cocked her head.

"I've dreamed of you," she said, and Judal's gaze shifted from the sunset to her, and his eyes told her that he knew. He smiled a bit, as if he was up to something.

"I have, too," he replied, and Java felt - relief? recognition? - as she dropped her head and laid down on the moss growing next to slightly bending grass, and after a moment she heard Judal follow suit.

"...Haha, did you believe me?" Judal's mischevious, teasing lilt brought her back to reality. Java shot up, a horror-stricken look on her face.

"Now that I said it like that it sounds really creepy," Java waved a hand, panicking over him, head in her hands. He gave her a dull reprimanding stare. "I promise I didn't mean it like that, I meant like-"

"Oh my god, I know what you meant, sheesh, calm down," he said, and he reached up with one hand and grabbed the back of her head and dragged her down on top of him so her head hit his stomach. "Oof! What the heck, why is your head so frickin heavy?"

They remained like that for a minute longer, but this silence seemed less forced this time, less stilted, and more like a genuine enjoyment of the situation they had found themselves in. Java bonked her head up and down onto Judal's stomach, neck straining a bit from the effort, until Judal snorted and shoved her off entirely. She yelled.

The magi, she knew from the beginning, the magi were illuminated, bright like beacons. And they knew it, too. She had met each and every one of them once before, in both her dreams and her nightmares, and they each became acutely aware of her as they did the others. She could feel the roaring anger under Judal's skin, the apprehension, the sadness, and while he would never admit it, a hint of fear. In return, he could see what she saw of the universe, the planets she'd inadvertently destroyed, the dust as it crumbled beneath her fingers. There would never be a paradox, because she had made the worlds before they had ever known it.

"And I thought my life was sad," Judal finally spoke, and she could feel his fingers around her wrist tighten. She patted his face without meaning to, just bringing a hand over her head blindly and covering his eyes.

"That doesn't mean it's any less meaningful," she replied, slapping his face until he growled and smacked it off. It seemed like the right answer.

Then she remembered the walls Sindria had to keep out intruders. Yamuraiha should've noticed right now. "How did you even get in here, anyway?"

Judal twirled his wand, smirking. "Dunno."

"Yeah, right." Java sighed. They both got up then, fully facing each other, and Java reached out with one hand. "Good to see you, Judal."

"Good to see you, too," he said, and he seemed awestruck, almost disbelieving, as if everything was still a dream. "I can't believe you're real."

Java cackled. "Thanks."

The magi shook his head to get rid of his thoughts. Then, before either of them could think, he grabbed her hair and began forcefully rubbing it until it stuck up in multiple directions. Java shrieked this time and flailed, nearly hitting him in the process.

Once Judal had flown away through the barrier (he melted it, that idiot, he refracted the barrier so that Yamuraiha wouldn't notice his entrance,) she headed back inside the walls, back turned to the Kamalas and the waves, but all she could see was the single, burning sun, lasting a fraction of her lifespan, knowing that in the course of history they would all disappear. And she hoped it would last, just a little longer.

* * *

see ya later


	6. Chapter 6

i am a pokemon master

* * *

Chapter 6

The rukh pushed certain visions in her direction, things that she wouldn't have noticed in the beginning but she was forced to see anyway. They held a certain series of signals that they noted specifically since that was to their nature: they were the strings of fate, and to break those strings was to do the impossible because they made up the fabric of the world. Java did not care.

 _The beginning,_ Ill Ilah promised. _We shall all turn back to the beginning. We can start over, once again._

A part of her had recoiled when the being of the black rukh had said those words, but at the same time a tiny, tiny part of her agreed with it. Wanted the universe to halt in its tracks because once it was gone she would be alone again, just as she had in the beginning. Eventually the stars would die out, become white dwarfs, then turn black and cold and then disintegrate entirely, and the younger black holes would flare together into one, technicolor mass of nothing, and then she would see nothing but her own reflection because the universe was _dead._

Death had always been inevitable. But this time, nothing would grow back to ever replace it. And for once, she was scared.

The rukh shone bright, however, and she remembered that even if the world ended, even if she would have to stand alone and suffer countless cycles over and over again, that did not in any way allow a creature to take away the life of another, for that meant a form of selfishness that she would never accept willingly. So she stood impartial, disillusioned with the ways of the white rukh and disjointed by the whispers of the black. She wished, not for the first time, that they would simply understand.

"This is why I never want to participate with these worlds," she said to no one, grass whistling in the winds as her words were blown away into nothing. She could hear the townspeople working before dawn broke, metal clanging and rousing her with the smell of freshly baked bread and dishes heaped with delicacies. She was not hungry. She did not have to be. But her stomach rumbled anyway and she got up to trek slowly back to the palace where she had left the king and his entourage.

Sinbad the Great. Sinbad the Voyager, Sinbad the Sailor, Sinbad of the Seven Seas. He was a blip on her radar that she did not care much about, but the rukh whispered eagerly to her anyway and she shrugged them off with a frown of indifference. What this man had done was unthinkable in the eyes of mortals, yes, but it was also terrible in the dreams he sought.

He was not a good man simply because he was favored, because he had worked hard. She knew that because her eyes saw further than the shell he carried. He carried the will of the rukh. He wanted to be a king. And he would do anything to reach that goal.

She had seen from the kings before him that they had struggled to reach the summit, succeeded, then watched in horror as everything they worked towards fell apart around them, and she knew by heart that Sinbad would be the same. In her eyes, he would never be king, because nobody should have to suffer through that and Sinbad would destroy both the world and himself in the process. He had made puppets of men. Kougyoku's hopes fell ill at his misdeeds. Java did not respect him, and she most likely never would.

Java saw them outside, just about to depart to who knows where, and Masrur with his eagle eyes saw her first. Sinbad greeted her with a friendly hello. Java wanted to rearrange his face, but that probably wouldn't help her situation with Ja'far judging by the way the assassin glared murder and so she returned the hello with little enthusiasm.

"Sailor," she greeted dully, then eyed Masrur in contemplation. "Why do you follow this man?"

Masrur stared back impassively. Java shrugged. "Suit yourself."

Sinbad confusedly watched her as she walked past them and to where she assumed the kitchens were based on the amount of noise made there, then looked back at Masrur who had somehow stiffened under her gaze. "Are you alright?" He asked.

Masrur's eyes were dark, darker than wine and deeper with the dawning realization of the traveler he had seen. In his mind's extraordinary vision he saw the dragons soaring high above him, ancient blood coursing through his hands and his feet and wings spanning wide across the fields as he breathed fire into the ether, and his eyes shifted back to Sinbad with a quiet contemplation that had the man shudder for reasons unknown.

"...Yes," he replied, and that was that.

Java reached the kitchens and was roughly apprehended by several kitchen utensil-bearing folk, who apparently had enough time fending off people to know when they were scavenging for food. She stole an apple and several breads before she was kicked out again, and she wandered the halls ruminating over the food and her thoughts.

"Thermodynamic miracles, events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold. That is the crowning unlikelihood."

"But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget. I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions." She stopped there, since she did not remember the rest of the quote. The sun shone still, a pale gold in the distance. It would rise in its intensity soon, when the mist faded and the sun would rise above them higher in an arc of light that soothed her down to the bones with its warmth.

She struggled to find the words.

"We are life, rarer than quarks and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which time and space leave their fingerprints most clearly. And it is a fact of being, that is all that matters."

And with that, something within her released its stranglehold. She grinned then, out into the nothing and the blades of grass waving in the distance, the trees growing on this tiny speck of land and the sun overtaking them all, and there the sun shined back and the world slowed down a little, just to take a breath.

* * *

She wanted to meet the magi.

The fairies were fond of him, she could tell by the way they followed after him as he ran along unobservedly. So with a step she knocked into him, helped him back up as he apologized profusely, and stared at him as he looked up and stared back.

"Wow, you sure do look a lot like Solomon," she remarked.

He was small, still a child, and he contained that same energy that she saw often in a lot of children: he knew what was right and what was wrong, just from a glance, saw deeper than the appearance she was hiding. She could tell by the way he blinked a bit, slack-jawed as if he'd never seen a woman contained by the universe before, and then he smiled at her as if she belonged in this world, however many times the rukh told her otherwise. Blue hair tumbled down in a long, thin braid that reached his feet. She felt her grin grow wider as she ruffled his hair in an odd, brotherly gesture.

"I look like-" he began, and then with a large cloud of smoke two large blue arms came bursting out of the flute tied loosely around his neck by a piece of twine. She was crushed almost completely by its weight in which she was held up helplessly for a long moment, but when the rest of the body came out she soon realized that she was not in fact being strangled, but rather being hugged in a very enthusiastic embrace.

"-Ow," she said in a very unenthusiastic way, and she was set down as the giant djinn kneeled down beside them. Java's brow furrowed, wondering when Aladdin had taken the flute off from around his neck otherwise this would have gone very differently. She was somewhat glad that the kid didn't have to suffer from death by lynching.

"Ugo, this is Java," Aladdin said eagerly to the rather masculine figure. She had not expected Ugo to be reincarnated this built: she'd always seen him as a slightly wimpy man, carrying books and doing what smart people did as they solved the uncontainable force that was the human existence. She squinted: she wasn't quite sure how Ugo managed to see her observing but soon he flushed pink and retreated back into the flute without a word. She was slightly concerned with that issue he had.

"Oh, I knew that guy," she said, scratching the side of her head. "He was quite the strange case, that one. He knew a lot of big complicated words when he had a mouth. Where did his head go, by the way?"

Aladdin shrugged, his face showing a grave contemplation as if he had never thought of the question before. Had he never seen Ugo's face? "I'll ask him later."

"I see."

Aladdin jumped up and began pulling her towards a certain direction, taking up most of the conversation with happy exclamations and wild pointing. They knew each other's names from another time, similarly to the other magi. He was the most open out of all of them, however naive the other three thought he was: Java respected him. Aladdin's age meant little, and so did any pride that clouded the eyes of men who searched for a purpose.

"I wish people thought more like you," she told him once during their routinely dream-conversations after they'd talked several times. Aladdin grew solemn sometimes, subjects that he had never encountered before coming up to meet him, and Java helped him through it. It was sad, but necessary, like pangs of hunger. He would never understand the necessity of consuming food if he had never experienced the pain of not being full.

"What do I think like?" Aladdin stopped, ruminated over how strangely he had worded that question, but asked it again anyway.

"You don't care about who's better or worse than anyone," Java replied, and her eyes were alight. It was joy. The rukh retreated from both their memories, and for the first time in a long time she didn't feel so suppressed by their need for her to become some divine entity. "You don't think that there are people who are inherently inferior to someone else, whether by fate or by wealth or by power. Even the smallest ant on this earth deserves its own tiny fraction of a life, and it is a gift to be alive unhindered by people who wish harm by controlling their grasp."

With that statement Aladdin placed one hand over hers, and in his childlike appearance she saw the most simplest of answers that the scientists could not understand through matter or space, through physics and atoms and the Schrodinger's cat: there was acceptance. An appreciation.

They wandered around town for a bit. Java bought a loaf of bread and a block of cheese, which they shared and devoured in seconds. She'd bought peaches after the food, and the boy seemed ecstatic. He began tapping his flute, moving his fingers on the notes in a pattern he was familiar with but not playing the notes. Java bit into her peach in amusement as they walked past the shops. The rukh clustered. They seemed to match the intensity of Judal's, but it lacked the violent patterns that Judal's rukh always seemed to have: this boy had slow, coordinated motions, as if the rukh were floating.

And so they continued to walk past the rows of buildings until they came across the backwater areas, with shadier businesses and a large brothel stood. Aladdin stared at the voluptuous women coyly inviting them inside before Java pulled him this time and they escaped just barely. They ended up at Alibaba's small apartment. Java slowed down, believing that this was to be their destination, but Aladdin continued walking and looked back expectantly at her.

"Right," she realized soon. "We're in Qishan."

Qishan was a slave town. She'd traveled there before a couple of times, and a few shopkeepers recognized her the moment she stepped off gravel and onto the paved cobble. Java bowed her head as they walked closer to the center of the city, hearing the telltale clink of chains as they saw the lines of slaves being carted off to be auctioned.

"What is that noise, miss?"

She stilled and glanced down at Aladdin, surprised. In concept he had never been outside the flute before, but now that Aladdin wasn't purposefully isolated from the remainder of the world she realized that he really didn't know many things. She told the truth.

"Slaves," she responded. "Those are the sound of people in chains."

He looked up at her, and there was something there that she saw very often in herself. "Are we not going to help them?"

Aladdin met her gaze. There were years of experience in such a tiny body, she thought as his stare (too serious, so very still) lessened in recognition. And then his bright grin returned with just as much force, and he bounded off in that direction with purpose as Java raised her hands.

( _The Old World watched the slaves in the distance, beaten back and worn.)_

Java assessed her location. She was still around the perimeter of the city, and she planned on circling around to eavesdrop on guards. They often revealed information on the times that slaves were imported, along with the places they came from. She managed to carve a bowl out of a third of the watermelon she'd just nabbed off a vendor, and it was only then that she noticed them.

She had visited several people throughout the remainder of the morning, and as usual, there was no news aside from several slaves being auctioned off. It was ill advised to delve too deep into the business in Qishan, considering the various figures in palaces within and surrounding the area, all of which dealt in slave business. Whenever she visited, she would watch black market dealings, buy the slaves, then free them. Gold came at her fingertips, spun from air. She did not wish to dilute the economy, so later she just resorted to knocking them all out instead.

Her body felt as if it were on fire, and her head was blazing. Aladdin only got a brief second to see the slaves before Java flung the men guarding the line up high into the air. The onlookers stared upward at the screaming thugs, and in the meantime Java snapped the shackles apart with a flick of the fingers.

"Alright, you're free, I don't have any money but you can have this," she said, and they only took one collective stare at the men (who were definitely not coming down for quite some time) before they looked back at her and she sprouted loaves of baked bread from her palms, uncaring of Aladdin's wide-eyed trance.

Quickly the freed men and children realized that they did not need their fight-or-flight responses to kick in and just gazed uncomprehendingly at the two, holding bread and just staring. Java blinked back, unsure of what else to say. "What?"

Aladdin nudged her. "Say something to them."

She frowned. "What is there to say? They're free now, and that's all that needs to happen."

Aladdin made a face at her. "Just do it. Come on, it isn't that hard."

Java sighed, getting up by using a nearby stack of crates as leverage. Staring at the sea of faces, she looked for something that she could tell these people that would be meaningful enough, something that they didn't already know. She was definitely not in the right place to do this and she knew none of them. She scratched at her elbow.

Eventually, she spoke anyway.

"'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.'"

"'Who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall.'"

"Centuries ago, centuries in the future, we will all suffer through the same motions, and that is terrifying. I am sorry that each of you had to go through this, taken and bruised and beaten down until you became mere husks of what you were before, perhaps physically, perhaps mentally as well."

She rubbed the back of her neck. "All I can say is that there are people right here, around you, who have suffered exactly as you have. Take comfort in them. These feelings, however much they claw on the inside, wear you down and destroy you slowly, are there. It will never be just something that goes away, and there will never be a cure to remove those feelings. It does not disappear in a year, or several years."

"And yes, it's really fucking unfair. And it will never be fair, no matter how many people say that it's over now, you can get better, and it will always be a part of you. It never just disappears. And I'm not going to lie about it, because it sucks and you'll continue to suffer from the years they've taken from you."

"Please, know that despite the wrongdoing that they have done, the lives they have taken, the thoughts that they may have crushed, just know that you can take that pain and turn it into something else. So take that chance."

She bowed jerkily, hopped off the crate, and walked back to Aladdin's side. The sound they made was deafening: Java was almost afraid of the strength they were using and the raucous applause as if they'd be toppling over soon after due to the energy lost in the process. She thought she almost did see one waving in the wind like a leaf about to be blown over.

Java tried to smile but it came out as a grimace. Aladdin took pity on her and began tugging her out of there. She didn't want to start suffering another mess.

She didn't feel as nervous anymore when they finally slowed down to walk around the area. There was an oak sitting in the middle of the public garden area, though it was less than well tended to at the moment and the patches of grass around it were wilting. Java leaned closer and started pulling out the weeds she saw, finding something to do with her hands while Aladdin furrowed his brow at her.

"So you're-"

"-not human," she replied, but her voice sounded too emotional about it. She coughed, swallowed hard, then tried again. "I'm not real."

"But you are real."

Aladdin's bluntness cut through her like a knife. She shook her head, denying the answer but not saying it aloud. "The world is a simulation," she said, "and I am the puppet on the stage, acting on the whims of God."

Aladdin thought for a while. "Well, have you met this God?"

"No."

"Then how do you know it exists?"

Java opened her mouth to answer, but a large screeching tone stopped them both in their tracks. Across the garden and the oak were several large wagons carrying goods, and a young man with blonde hair and a thin red scarf was hurriedly moving crates and baskets of fruits to and fro. A fat man with a small ponytail was ordering him about.

"HEY!"

Alibaba flinched, his lips turning upwards in a nervous grin as he held the crate with rolled-up sleeves. "What the hell are you doing, maggot!? I don't pay you for standing-"

Java flung the man up, similarly to how she'd flung the guards into the air, except this time she skyrocketed him up and past the buildings until he became a mere speck in the distance. She hoped he landed somewhere hard. Alibaba's jaw dropped open, and Aladdin had already given up on stopping it.

The two bodyguards that had been next to him unsheathed their weapons immediately, but she flung them up too and tied them up so that they were stuck high on top of the oak tree. Java dusted off her hands as if she'd done and put effort into the final judgment. Alibaba screamed.

Several minutes later, when he was finally done spasming over his existential crisis and the magi had finished comforting him over Java's act of kindness, they departed quickly before their ears died from the spouting curses the guys in the tree were making. (Java considered a gag, but changed her mind at the last second.)

They walked down the alleyways and through the market, following Alibaba's pace that had a rather brisk energy to it. He seemed nervous, flinching whenever he saw something that moved too quickly when they passed by. Java didn't understand it that well. Aladdin trotted beside him with excitement, staring at people and the various trinkets in stalls as if this were the first time he's seen a place like this. She pulled him away when he started grabbing a bit too much, saying that none of them had any money.

They ducked under a brightly colored stall cover and entered a darkened room, the same place that they had passed before. She had to blink quite a few times for her eyes to adjust to the change, leaving sharp pinpricks behind her eyes.

The room was dusty. There was dried meat hung on clips above them, and a large basket sat on the far wall. The remainder of the meager decoration consisted of small pots and a roll of parchment on the shelves.

"Sleeping outside is better," Java quipped, and Aladdin nudged her in the ribs.

"Hey, what's that?" He peeked into a basket eagerly.

"Don't touch that! There's food in there." He reached over to grab something from his desk and he came back over to where Java leaned on the doorway. "Thank you for helping me," he said, quieter. "I didn't thank you earlier."

Java awkwardly patted him on the shoulder. "No problem."

"Hey, hey! Alibaba! I think Ugo-kun would like to meet you!" Aladdin showed his flute, the symbol starkly emblazoned on the front. "Well, I think it'd be too cramped to let him out right now…"

"Ugo can't talk at the moment anyway," Java spoke. "It's okay, we'll get your head out of there someday, Ugo, even if Aladdin can only summon your strangely built body like you're eye candy or something."

At this, even the flute turned pink. Alibaba tried pretending that this was normal but gave up on that as well.

"How does the headless thing, uh... work?" Alibaba looked extremely taken aback by their conversation. "Is he decapitated?"

"His neck is attached to the flute, so it's in there somewhere," Aladdin responded, and Java could see Alibaba attempt to visualize his description.

Almost complete darkness settled in on them like a blanket. There was barely a light source from where a small opening was in the wall, and there were no windows. Their conversation had settled into whispers since Alibaba appeared to have neighbors, and Alibaba himself lit a long candle so that they could have some small source of light. Aladdin's excitable nature calmed down as the sun set, and by the time it was night he sat next to Java, a plaintive question in his eyes.

She sat in pitch black, feeling manifestations come to life. The Kamalas always seemed its strongest at night, where shadows dominated and the light could only reach so far.

She felt the tendrils of shadows creeping up the back of her neck and shivered inwardly, setting Aladdin on top of the pillow she had been sitting on. She got up quickly to retrieve another pillow for Alibaba before finding her hand hovering over the door handle, unsure.

"Java," Aladdin murmured. She froze. "I noticed before, but in your rukh..."

Java's heart caught in her throat.

"Ugo always used to tell me about the world from what he's known of it," Aladdin began. "But this place, sometimes he describes it as if it was a different place entirely. All the birds I used to see were white, but yours are grey."

"It's not-" She stopped herself. What was the use of the words 'good' and bad'? They wouldn't mean anything, because there was nothing she had to prove wrong to him. Aladdin waited patiently for her answer.

"The rukh, Aladdin," Java told the magi, "they're not stupid creatures. They're the lives of the ones that used to be alive. But if nobody ever listened to their stories, then what are they worth anymore?"

Aladdin fell silent yet again. In that silence she could hear all the clearer the emptiness, the hollow singing of machinery. The blood drumming in her ears sounded almost like clocks gearing up and turning in her head, processing information and spitting it back out. "Every single one of them matters," Java said, "and no matter what, anybody can change. One mistake they made in life can change their entire biology in the one after it, and that is a terrifying thing to think about. Everybody comes across the subject of death, and in these interpretations we always write out what could have happened or we make up new stories from their existence. That is such an important thing to think about, because even after the dead pass on the ones still living can carry on their name, keep holding on to the memories made, and with that death will never actually be death because they are still remembered. The analogy of reading a book, when you can say that death is like being in a book whose story was being told, that is a great example of how much it means to be living."

"That's why you should listen," Java said. "Because no matter if they spout hatred for the world or praise, I want to listen, and I want to tell people what they say. Because that is what their entire lives have given them in the end, those words they whisper, and their meanings still matter. It matters."

"Yeah," Aladdin replied, and that was all he needed to say. The flute remained still on his chest. Java felt any tension in her body fading.

"So, tell me about what Ugo's told you about the world," she prodded him with a mischevious grin, and Aladdin happily filled her in on Ugo's retelling. Much of it sounded similar to both worlds, it was vague enough to fit the description for both of them equally, but Java saw the parts Ugo had omitted and parts where he'd filled in himself: Solomon's world had been taken and written anew, and just like rebirth the new one would never truly be the same as the last. Java listened, as she always did.

The part with the dragons surprised her. "There are no dragons in this world," Java persisted, but the flute turned hot and angry under Aladdin's grasp. The boy yelped and leaned forward so it wouldn't touch his skin and burn him.

She tried to think of possible places where the dragons remained. The Fanalis, hidden in the Dark Continent, and the pockets of the Old World where the dungeons existed. The creatures from the previous universe were preserved there. The dragons were technically not from this world, however, and she frowned.

"...Oh, whatever," she said, and the flute returned to a simmering warmth as Aladdin released a breath.

"Oh, crap, it's morning," she said, noticing a flicker of light streaming through the gap. "It literally feels like it's been a minute."

"You should sleep."

"I don't need sleep," Java replied, and Aladdin's reprimand died in his throat as he realized that she had meant it, she really could survive without the urge to sleep. "You, however, do."

"No I-"

Java put her hand over his eyes and grappled with him to the floor. "You stay there," she warned him, and his struggling died down as he succumbed quickly to rest. Java checked the candle, settled with her back against the wall, and waited.

Alibaba stretched with a wide yawn, then stopped halfway when he realized that he had guests over. He scrambled to his feet and saw Java blearily staring up at him, having been bored of sitting for hours by herself. "Good morning," he said cautiously. Java's hand went up to wave in hello.

"Aladdin went to sleep really late, I'd say to let him sleep in but I assume you have to leave."

Alibaba scraped a piece of wood off the table he had in the corner. "Well, I probably can't go back to my old job, to be honest. Budel seemed really mad last time, and I don't know if he's coming back today but he's definitely gonna fire me after that."

"...Sorry," Java said, not knowing exactly what to be sorry for but saying it anyway, yet Alibaba shook his head.

"It's alright, I hated that guy anyway." Alibaba laughed. "But now I'm gonna have to find a new place, Budel will kill me if he finds me now-"

"Oh, I got you covered," she said. "Don't worry. I know seventy-two ways to kill a man."

If Alibaba could have gotten any paler, he would have been white as a sheet. "Oh. Okay."

Death threats aside, Java shrugged. "Anyway, I'm assuming you still need money? You should come dungeon-diving with us. We're really gonna need one sane person out of the three of us, and I'm gonna tell you right now that that person is not me."

Alibaba blinked at her. "You're-"

"Yeah."

He quickly grabbed for the scroll on his table and unraveled it, pointing at the descriptions. "You-"

"Yeah."

He sat down heavily, putting his head in his hands. "Sorry. I need a minute."

"Take your time. Aladdin's probably dead to the world right now."

Alibaba used that time to stare unrelentingly at the ground. If he could, he probably would've burned a hole straight through the clay and into some poor man's underground base. He looked back up after a minute, relief so present in his gaze that Java could feel the goosebumps. "Thank you."

"No problem, kid."

Budel did come to visit them, though not in person. Apparently the bodyguards had come back down and went to visit Alibaba in the hopes of catching him alone, one of them holding Alibaba's contract, only to be greeted face first by Java smiling as if nothing was wrong. They turned completely around and left. They haven't returned since. Java burned the scroll.

Aladdin woke up several hours after the incident, stretching much like a slinky would to Java's amusement. "Wakey wakey, sunshine," she said, picking him up and carrying him. "Okay, we're ready, let's go."

"Are you sure about this?" Alibaba asked. "Aladdin's not even fully awake yet."

"Yeah, we're good," Java told him, smacking Aladdin in the face a couple of times until he bit her finger and she yelped. "Ow! Okay, okay, get up!"

"Hrrrghhhhh," was Aladdin's reply.

Java grabbed the turban off the sleepy kid and flung it open despite Alibaba's protests. "Let's go," she said, pushing Aladdin's floundering body on the magic floating fabric, and with a lunge Alibaba landed just as Java shot the turban up, heading straight for the tower that hid the djinn.

They met him about a minute later.

"Uh, what-" Java said, landing somewhere that was definitely not the mess of monsters she'd expected to see but the gobsmacked, outraged members of the Kou court.

"So you're the three that man was talking about," a veiled figure that she found awfully familiar mused.

"This isn't part of the script," she muttered.

Al Thamen watched her with a vein of contempt, circling around them so that they could not escape. Java eyed the woman sitting above them all, legs crossed, watching her without a hint of that well-known smile on her face as she recognized Java as soon as their eyes met.

"It's you," Gyokuen said.

"Bye," Java responded, and she teleported them out of there and straight into Amon's tower. The walls were already trembling, apparently, and she saw a glimpse of Morgiana and the other two on the other side. Amon was facing them.

"No time here just," she yelled, and with a wrench Amon was sucked in to Alibaba's unsuspecting blade. She then made the teleportation pad, dumped all of them including the two near-dead guys and the Fanalis, then shot them the hell out of there just as everything crumbled back into nothing.

"The _money,"_ Alibaba bawled, and Aladdin jumped up to smack him on the back of the head in a reprimanding manner. The other three had backed up warily when the escape was complete, watching Java as if she'd come to eat their children and bathe in their blood. Which she may or may not have seen before once. That was a surprising thought.

"One second I'll address you later," she said to them, then looked skyward and shouted, "Fuck you, Judal!"

There was no reply, but she did see the remains of the black rukh wave back in an apologetic manner. She then turned to Alibaba, who was holding his dagger like a baby and rocking back and forth.

"Here," she said, and gold coins literally came flooding out of her hands and pooled at Alibaba's feet. Alibaba slumped down, not even questioning her capabilities anymore. The ringleader prince guy in white stepped forward, seeming very angry looking and not much else.

"Who are you?" He seemed to be talking to her as if she were the designated speaker. She looked to Aladdin for help, but the magi seemed to be very busy consoling Alibaba to be of any assistance. They'd have to pull Amon out soon, but she wasn't sure if Aladdin was ready to do that yet.

The guy seemed to have lost all patience and stomped his foot in an aggressive manner. Java thought that he was having a tantrum. "Answer me!"

"Oh, I am so very sorry, my dear esteemed guest," she demurred, "but I'm afraid reservations are required for this party. Yours seems to have gotten mixed up elsewhere."

She could not have been more obvious about the cue for them to leave. However, the prince (was he even a prince? She couldn't remember) sniffed, standing back up to his full height. Which may or may not have been imposing if one of his bodyguards standing behind him was built like a truck. "Well, I'll overlook your error this time. Now, the dagger."

Oh, right. Java turned slowly to the two, who were talking quietly in low voices, and they looked back this time at her confusedly. "Aladdin," she said, "the guy wants Alibaba's dagger."

Aladdin hopped up with a bright grin on his face. "No, that djinn is his," he told the prince directly.

The guy sneered down at him. "And who are _you_ to tell me what is and what is not rightfully mine? Give me the dagger."

"Hey, don't take other people's things," she defended. "That's rude."

The prince seemed not to care for either of their opinions anymore and turned to his companions. "Get them for me," he ordered.

However, Aladdin turned his back to them and raised his staff, and with that motion he pulled out Amon along with Ugo, and they were blown back by the increase of rukh that came out at his command. The three behind her fell to their knees, crouching down low to avoid the wind blowing them away.

"He's a magi," The prince breathed.

"Nice job, genius," Java said back. He was too awestruck to reply.

Aladdin turned to the djinns happily, eager to explain to them. Amon spoke first, however. "Dear magi," he greeted, bowing his head. "I am so pleased to-"

He stopped mid-speech when he saw Java. "Oh," he said more quietly, and Java grimaced.

"Yeah," she said, coughing into a fist. "It's me."

Amon reintroduced himself and continued talking, but all the while Java felt herself shrinking back. Normally nobody survived long enough to see her in another world, but there was a failsafe in this magic system and Ugo's unsurmountable plan: the rukh existed. And in that rukh, every single person from the past was able to see her because her body did not crumble, her heart did not cease in its beating. She was the last thing any of them saw in the pitch black of nothing, and she could only stare back in melancholy existence.

Did every person of the rukh come from the Old World? Was it other worlds, too? She could imagine the countless places she'd visited, countless more that she still remembered frequently, and she could still remember the order in which they came apart in her grasp. Her consciousness was falling out of place.

"Fuck," she said, and she did the first thing she could think of: she blinked out of existence.

* * *

so hey

uh it helps me a lot when i write so its therapeutic, but for some reason it's easier to draw when im happy and write when im sad. im sad as heck right now and wow this is a terrible way to tell it but

thanks


	7. Chapter 7

my goal for this chapter was to get over 15,000 words lets see if i do it

* * *

Chapter 7

It wasn't truly blinking out of existence: it was mostly a replacement, a warp, an escape mechanism that Java did not quite get the natural physics of and did not care to think too hard about either. She was elsewhere, and that was that.

But she thought about other things in the meantime, and she looked up at the cacophony of rukh swirling abovehead like festooning kite flags, each wrapped up in one another so that she couldn't tell wing from wing. Three thousand meters high and only one foot in span they followed her gaily.

She was a god, once; not quite cruel, but not always there to assist poor stragglers, either. Her intervening had terrible consequences. The rukh knew, the souls of the dead that watched her as carefully as she did them, and the wall was there again between them that neither of them had the capability to break no matter which one tried first. Neither of them had quite given up yet. From her memories she carefully dredged up the things she did remember of her past and her coming to existence, unsure of whether she needed to or not.

Once upon a time nothing existed but the inky blackness of the universe and the sky tree, floating on the structures of the dead it grew from. The earth was nothing, the sea was nothing, and nothing breathed or sang or spoke. Then from the fruit of Yggdrasil dropped the gifts of life, the seeds that sprouted into oak and maple, cedar and willow, and came the living beings that would feast on nectar and breathe freely and from Yggdrasil's heart came pouring down the lifewater of existence, and then came forth fish and coral and all the terrors that ruled the ocean. The birds soared and mastered the skies, and hungry creatures roamed the lands and fed from the great tree's splendor. And so it was.

The branches of the tree were tall, pouring out thousands and thousands of leaves that were seen as sacred, things that made the fabric of the universe strand together. Java - without a body, only a concept, her true form labeled as the thing called "Time" - watched on harmoniously, a guide, reverent of the god that had created her.

She had never exactly been needed, since before the time of Yggdrasil's death Java had never really mattered. Nothing grew sick or died of illness or old age: they drank from the lifewater and became young again. The Almighty suffused its energy into plants and beasts and all of the fae, and Java simply listened to their tales and watched them thrive.

However, some were cruel. Some were greedy. And then the greedy ones overtook them, overtook them all, stole and stole until there was nothing else left and they turned tail as everything began to wither and die, and suddenly Java realized what was happening as Yggdrasil grew weaker and weaker, shedding golden leaves that turned brown and withered. Something was wrong.

Yggdrasil was dying.

So she desperately followed, watched the beasts as they grew stronger and ate and fed without remorse, grasping for something to keep ahold of. She felt anger, anger for the maker, anger at the creatures who had turned on their creator and swallowed Her whole just to become immortal. But they didn't have the gift. They could not make things anew. And so they as well realized their mistake, when animals died over and over continuously and fruit withered out: the skies grew dark and grim, and the natural state was devastated by their ruin. And then they tried to do what Yggdrasil could, but they could not do it, they did not have the leaves to make or the roots to grow, and the world grew colder and colder by the century.

That was just one terror. Java saw many more of the same predictable outcome, laid across millions of planets and infinite galaxies, all of Yggdrasil's gifts thrown away and abused and eventually the thief's greed turned to realization, and then the cycle began anew until there were thousands of dead planets, littered and tossed away like trash.

It happened like a cycle, over and over again. Java wondered when it would end, when they would let the tree return to nothing and be reborn again with enough time, enough effort, and they could nurture a new Yggdrasil, a new god that would know kindness but also respect, for itself, to be selfish for once. But it never happened. Yggdrasil had given everything to them. Time passed. Java wept.

Eventually she realized that something had changed in her, too, as she watched these things. She felt a strong urge to intervene, to fix, to give the olden faith that this was only a passing struggle and that it was not impossible to change for good. And she grew from the tear of the dying tree and the lives of those who wanted to live, determined to aid the people suffering and do the right actions.

It took a while, at first. She was so unused to being mortal that she struggled with bodily movement: she flew too easily, she did not obey the laws of physics, she had no shadow or footsteps to contain her. The fae were unusually friendly with her where they normally avoided humans, and Java knew that the humans themselves would figure her out too well. So with that she observed people, attempting to imitate them, so she could shape herself to fit her form.

Java could not become human but she could very well act like one. She did figure it out, eventually, although her acting wasn't very good and nobody really cared anyway. She ran off into the more obscure villages, chattered on about nothing, directing their attention to anything but her abnormalities. She was good at distracting people.

There was only one place that she called home. Normally she gave some inane reasoning that the world was her oyster and she slept anywhere because the earth welcomed her visiting, but then she would get dragged out by annoyed villagers back onto the road and she realized that it would probably be easier if she just made something out of it. So her hut came into existence, and there she stayed until the world would reach its inevitable climax.

The breweries were in the door behind the cabinet, professionally cared for and washed off. The shelves were carefully organized, and Java made sure that the dried medicines were in full view of sunlight while the bottles were behind locked doors. The Valokas passed by often and stole some of them if they weren't in the proper place. Java blamed them for a lot of things even though it most likely wasn't them and she just forgot where certain things were.

She struggled to breathe sometimes. She started off with pretending to do it, but soon she found herself doing it unconsciously, withdrawing for a moment to breathe in and feel her senses tingling. She enjoyed being human, she found, even if the rest of humanity didn't.

"What's wrong with me?" She asked now, and there was no reply. The rukh continued to spin endlessly above her, and she dropped her head on top of her knees. "I'm distracting myself from my own problems," she concluded by herself, then tried to continue breathing. "There's nothing wrong with distracting yourself from your own problems."

 _But not when you're avoiding them,_ her mind helpfully supplied. Java gave a muffled scream.

She knew at this point that Aladdin was waiting for her, they all were, and that eventually she would have to talk to Amon in person once again. Her heart swelled with longing: she had missed them. She had missed them all. But she had no fathomable clue over whether or not Amon had a veritable reason or had speculated over it, and she was scared that he might have guessed correctly.

"It's not the end of the world if they know everything," Java argued with herself, but she had seen thousands of kingdoms fall to her feet, begging for wishes that she could not grant lest she rend time in an unnatural and permanently altering manner. The violets bloomed beneath her, and the earthy scent of rain filled her senses. She broke a leaf off its stem and bit it in half, spitting out both parts. They had split equally. She ripped one again.

"If I pick the ruined one I won't tell Amon," she promised herself, then threw both halves away from her with a breath of wind. They fluttered, but the ruined one banked and came back to her, landing directly on her lap. The other half fell on the ground. She stared at the verdict uncomprehendingly.

She stood up with a clap of the hands. "Alright! That's settled!"

She knew that eventually Amon would ask and nothing good would come out of her waiting to tell them, but something else told her that she wasn't ready yet and that her psyche would break if she tried. So she kept her mouth shut and headed out of the rukh's embrace, back toward the world of the living and into the fray.

She returned to a world where nothing mattered and where Aladdin was frantically patting out flames that had sprouted on his shoulders.

"What the fuck," she said to them, and Aladdin turned around as he stopped mid-crouch so that he could roll about on the floor in sheer panic. He gestured to the fire on his person as if she hadn't already seen it and winced at the scorched markings it had made on his clothing. Java was pretty sure about a fourth of the blue vest he was wearing had been eaten away by flames, but luckily both his pants and the bandages were still intact.

"You're back!" He exclaimed in relief, then screeched as she slapped the fire away. "Ow! It's still hot!"

"Where's Alibaba?" She asked, looking around but seeing no sign of him or his newfound djinn. The slaver and his two thugs were gone, too.

Aladdin pointed toward a dot in the distance, where Java realized Amon was looming over the three interlopers quite threateningly. The leader of the group seemed to be waving his arms in a demanding (and childish) manner, pointing at the dagger Alibaba was holding, but the djinn simply shook his head and blew fire instead. The guy shrieked and hid behind the tall slave, cowering.

"God damn it," she said, smacking both palms onto her face and covering her eyes in the process. "I'm gone for ten seconds. Ten. Seconds."

"I think it was around four minutes, actually," Aladdin helpfully supplied. Java shot him a glare and he shut up, jaw clamped closed.

"What's up with you, though?" She asked, pointing. "Why aren't you up there helping?"

"I had to ask you a question," Aladdin intoned, expression serious, and her heart dropped to her stomach. Java laughed nervously. "Who are you?"

"I'm Jav-"

"I mean your history," he interrupted, placing a hand on her arm. "How do you know both Ugo and Amon? How did they know you as soon as they saw you?"

"Well, I _am_ a very recognizable figure," she said, head held up dramatically, but Aladdin continued to stare without faltering in his intensity. Java gave up her shtick. "Okay, okay, I'll tell you."

Java scratched off a vein from the leaf she'd split in two, trying to think of what exactly to say. The expectant image on Aladdin's face gave her incentive to tell the truth, and she did not want to lie to him, either. There was a reminder in the back of her head, grim and removed, telling her that rose-colored glasses had not saved her last time. The Old World pleaded for help, pleaded to her, because she had the skill to do it. But she did not. She was there to fix what needed to be fixed, and that previous world was not it.

"I am not god," she told him as she had told him many times before. "But throughout every universe and every world that I can reach, I can visit them in the form of a living being and try to guide their wrongs, halt them from reaching their inevitable destruction. I am a messenger."

"But you told me that-" Aladdin sounded angry. "You said that even the smallest ant should have the right to its own existence. Aren't you acting in the place of the rukh? Of an influence?"

"It is their choice," she told him, shaking her head. "I don't tell them what to do. I lay out the cards, and there is nothing left up my sleeve. If they choose to ignore the board altogether, they will surely reach doom faster than I can stop them. That is what happened to the Old World."

Aladdin didn't seem to understand, judging by the expression on his face. Java improvised. "Okay, then. Do you remember everything that led to the Old World's destruction?"

"No. I can see small fractions of the world, but a lot of it is lost to me."

Java threw away the leaf, rolling it up until it became a tiny fold of plant matter between her fingers and dropping it. "Queen Gyokuen and Al Thamen were people who tried to play the game by their own rules," she said. "I know the law of the world. I make the boundaries and make sure that nobody is acting out of line. However, I don't enforce these rules, and that is why I failed. They wanted to render Time immobile, rewind back to the very beginning of the universe, where everything is dead. That would affect everyone. I did not want that. I'm sure you don't want it, either."

Aladdin accepted her explanation as it stood, and despite her having never mentioned the Kou empress in his presence she could spot the tension in his arms when Java spoke her name. "Okay."

"I'm glad you asked, though." Java cracked a few joints, feeling the creaking of movement without relief nor pain. "Sometimes I do wonder if I should even be existing. Death is futile, but it should be made by natural causes, not by mass destruction of entire galaxies."

"I understand now." Aladdin flopped on the ground, landing on his behind and crossing his legs, watching Alibaba rant unabashedly. "I've always wondered."

Suddenly he got up, eyes sharpening. Java trailed after his gaze to see the leader unsheathe his blade and aim it at Alibaba. " _Stop_ ," he ordered, and his word reverberated across the ground and to the group of people. Java saw the guy step back, turning towards her direction, and she blinked toward them in seconds.

"Here," she supplied cheerfully, and she swiped the sword for a pair of hand gloves. The man looked down at it, stupefied. "I'm sure you can put these to good use instead. It'll keep your fingers warm."

"Return my weapon immediately," he ordered sharply, and Java blinked as the two behind him seemed to stiffen, the movements almost unnoticeable. There seemed to be some sort of trauma there. But then again, she could see Alibaba flinch in the corner of her eye. She promptly snapped the blade in half like a twig.

"Of course," she said, and with a flick of her hand the sharp ends of the sword were hovering inches from Jamil's neck. He froze, immobilized.

"T-take care of them!" He warbled, sounding very much like a terrified goose. "Morgiana!"

The Fanalis stepped forward in preparation to apprehend Java, but Aladdin stopped her with a borg shield, crushing her with its gravity. Morgiana buckled to her knees, teeth gritting as she attempted to stand.

Java slapped a hand over Jamil's mouth. When he attempted to struggle, she removed it and he found himself unable to open his mouth any longer. Java tied him to a tree using a vine, and he settled for glowered furiously as she propped him upright.

"Party's over, guys," she spoke consolingly, making sure to irritate him more by patting him on the shoulder. She could hear the muffled screaming. "Hello, Goltas."

Both Jamil and the other slave shifted uneasily, and Java was unsure of what exactly she had done that had triggered them. She remembered then: not once has Goltas' name ever been mentioned, at least not in her presence. She made a silent apology to the almost ex-slave.

"Esteemed magi," Amon interrupted rather timidly, "since my tower has been destroyed rather abruptly and you still have yet to officially choose a king, will you make the final decision to whom I shall serve?"

Aladdin looked directly at the man who had threatened his friend. Despite the accusations, Jamil's eyes still appeared hopeful. Java had no sympathy and glanced toward Alibaba instead, who was still clutching his dagger like a newborn fawn. She let herself wait for the result.

"Alibaba," he declared, and Goltas lunged.

Java's hand flew toward him in ready retaliation, but instead of attacking the magi or Alibaba he dropped in front of them and knelt on one knee. He couldn't speak clearly, and his voice was raspy from both his past injuries and disuse, but he spoke anyway, bowing his head in a sign of gratitude: "Thank you, magi."

Jamil seemed enraged, but Java continued to keep a grip on his shoulder and he stopped resisting, falling limp. Goltas' faceless mask turned towards her, and his eyes seemed to be unable to meet the eyes of his former master. Aladdin caught her attention at this point, gesturing for her to remove Jamil from her grasp (he wasn't going anywhere, he was practically attached to the tree) and separate from the group.

"I have another question," Aladdin asked, as Java was within earshot and Alibaba was having a staring contest with an expressionless Morgiana. She seemed to be a bit grouchy after finally getting out of the gravity borg, and it showed by how nervous Alibaba seemed to be and by how much he flinched whenever she moved. "How do you explain free will to someone who has never experienced it?"

They both knew that it was the slaves he was mentioning in this hypothetical situation. They both glanced sideways, watching them standing awkwardly as quite the strange-looking pair, hands and feet still shackled and clasping their hands together in signature signs of harmlessness. Java went along with it for Aladdin's sake.

"Free will is a comprehensible idea," Java exclaimed, waving her arms at the two. They seemed even more uncomfortable by her pointed gesturing, and so she stopped that. "Of course it is! Even as a slave, you can feel a little of it every day, and as a slave it is heavily repressed but still possible. Imagine, for example, you're looking at the hundreds of thousands of timelines, all at your viewing pleasure, and you decide in one moment one day that you choose to pick tea instead of coffee. In that moment you have plucked one timeline out of the many possibilities, and that was out of your own free will. I believe that is very important, because then why would anything matter? You'll die in the end anyway, and your existence will be meaningless otherwise if you think everything is predestined for you."

"But that's the fundamental belief of the rukh," Aladdin protested. "And isn't it a part of your philosophy, too? You can't hinder fate from occurring. It is premonition."

"Fate is a stupid idea," she said, waving a hand uncaringly. "It's there, but once you start ignoring it you'll find yourself being a lot more content. You just get to choose the timeline. They're all right there in front of you."

"They're there in front of me," Aladdin repeated, and again he seemed far off in his own universe, pinpointed down into two individuals who did not know their own fate and may not care. But there they stayed, and so Aladdin hid his frown. "Okay, Java. I'll try my best."

"Good," she replied.

Jamil was kept as hostage under the tree, and so Java set up a small campfire as dusk settled in upon them. The former slaves (now having broken shackles after Java cleaved the chains in two) were still very wary of their former master and stayed the farthest from the base of the tree. Java eventually revoked her spell to cease speech and Jamil was given the freedom to speak.

"Unhand me this instant!" He yelled, shaking his arms and trying to wiggle out of the rope. "I'll have you executed! I am the chief of Qishan, and mark my words, none of you will ever see the day of light. I will kill you with my own sword. I'll feed your entrails to the pigs. I-"

"What sword?" Java laughed, the remains of his previous sword still at her feet, but a murderous glare seared into the side of her head and she ducked away behind the less intimidating Aladdin for comfort.

Aladdin was seemingly uncomfortable with the death stare Jamil was giving, even if said stare was not directed at the magi. His opinion of the man was very low, and with the reactions Morgiana and Goltas was giving Aladdin still found reason to be quite angry at the man. Java prodded at Jamil with her questioning instead, making sure to walk right up and sit in an intimidating manner.

"So, where the heck did you grow up?" She asked him, slightly curious. Jamil flushed red yet again in anger and seemed to be three seconds from blowing his head off when she held up a hand again. "I'll make this twenty questions. I'm sure you have some questions too, right? Let's be buddies!"

"Swallow ten thousand needles and die," Jamil responded, his eyes ablaze with the promise of new torture. Java was unaffected, beaming brightly instead.

"See? That's the spirit!"

Morgiana seemed completely lost at the way Java was handling the man who tortured her every day of her life. Furthermore, Jamil seemed to be reciprocating her bantering, reluctantly biting back even when it had no effect on the magi's companion. He had stopped shrieking murder hours before when he realized that they wouldn't be able to hear him through shut mouth anyway.

"...I was born in Qishan," he spit out. "Why are you keeping me here? Will you kill me now?"

Morgiana twitched upon being under Jamil's cruel expression and mocking smirk, and Aladdin, who'd been keeping silent for some time, pulled her away from the group so that he could try speaking to her again. Java watched them go.

"Hey, Aladdin's a magi," Java bargained. Jamil avoided Aladdin's sight and bowed his head. He seemed to be regretful of that fact, however little Morgiana may have meant to him.

"Sooo," she continued when he did not say anything else to rebuke her, "what's your favorite color?"

Jamil appeared absolutely flummoxed by the question. He opened his mouth, then shut it. Java wondered if he had ever been asked that question before. Java decided to go first. "Okay, well, mine's green!"

"That is absolutely the dumbest question-" Java cut him off by shushing him, slapping a hand over his mouth. Jamil attempted a poor rendition of bite-the-hand, where Java failed to escape quickly enough and actually got bitten. There they struggled in a string of curses and yelps, with Java trying to pull her hand out of his mouth and Jamil finding a newfound lust for vengeance. Goltas made a noise, and they both turned.

"Are you-" Java stuttered. "Are you laughing at me? I'm suffering here!" Jamil released her with a dark scowl, but refused to try again. "Also, what are you, a barbarian? I thought I was gonna lose my finger-"

" _You_ were the one who decided to stick your hand in my-"

"Uh," said Aladdin, interrupting their conversation. Morgiana and Alibaba were right behind him. "Are we interrupting something?"

"No!" They both shouted, heads turning, their matching glowers making quite a comedic sight. Morgiana stifled a snort and put a hand up to her mouth to turn it into a bout of coughing, suspiciously similar to Goltas' reaction. Java's eyes narrowed, but Aladdin gave her another look and she relented.

"Hello," Java smiled at Morgiana, inclining her head to signal her respect. "Uh, glad to see you feeling better."

Morgiana nodded mutely in mutual agreement, hiding her face. "Mm."

Jamil's eye twitched, but he said nothing, much to Java's relief. Her attention moved to the fire, dancing shadows across their faces. There was music pounding in her ears, loud and intoxicating, and a vision came to her of a blinding dragon, bright and wild and free, senseless to anything but its own contentment and beautiful because of it. Java saw the yearning bubbling in Morgiana's own heart.

Java took initiative to ask, wondering if she had guessed right and Morgiana was wondering about something important to herself. Fire, in her case, was synonymous to the waves it cast, how influential it was as a heat source and for entertainment. It moved freely and without inhibition. "Hey, Morgiana, what do you like to do?"

Morgiana jerked up as if she had been shocked. "I..." Her eyes darted to her former master, silently seeking permission. Jamil refused to say a word, expressionless, and slowly she turned back to meet Java's gaze. Morgiana was fixated on the light as well, tapping her feet in time with the sound of unheard drums. She smelled rain and dirt, of long summer storms during the night that turned into early mornings and birdsong. The memory seemed to bring energy, but more importantly joy, and with this question her chains clinked in unison. " I like to dance. It reminds me of home."

Java laughed, and without a word she began to sing a tune without lyrics, a hum without meaning that rumbled like the sound of thunder. Jamil seemed to be skeptical at first as Java sung low, with an intensity that seemed quiet at first but grew in momentum. Morgiana heard the song, she had heard it before, and without meaning to she jumped on one foot as her instinct told her that she knew this song, she'd heard it, long-forgotten but remembered.. _._

The great creatures of the sky and sea, when the earth had just begun its nascent journey beyond humankind, the waters had risen many meters above any land surface and the oceans reigned, and yet the dragons - those who mastered flight, breathing fire and swimming down dark below and all the places in between there was a sense of freedom that could not be shackled.

And when the lands did rise - plains, fields, forests, breaking through the skylines, they claimed their birthright accordingly. In every marking of territory there were hierarchal systems, a line of kings, not only a concept that humans ended up taking as well but to judge who was the strongest. And yet even still, from the smallest dragon hatchling to the wisest and most venerable of rulers, that freedom remained.

Dragons remained the same even throughout worlds, Java mused as the vision overcame her. Morgiana had connected. The drums proceeded.

Alibaba hopped back in fright as Morgiana jumped high, farther than any human could hope to reach, over the fire so that her chains glinted gold and red and black as the soot it caught in midair. She was smiling now, wild and vividly jagged, burning the fuel that had lain in hiding all those years repressed, hidden; and in her mind, she could trace the golden stars floating alongside her, mapping out their stories as she told hers in jade and iridium, silver leaves and copper seeds that turned green and white with blossoms. She unclasped her hands and held her head high, speaking in the way she knew how, as her homeland grew closer and closer and she sung its name.

 _The dragons,_ Java mouthed, seeing something that they could not, stretching one arm upwards as the stars formed shapes, the world bent, and she saw them: all different colors and shapes and wings and breath, fire iridescent, so many variegated shades that she could not keep track of them all. She remembered this before, were they still alive and breathing? One stared back at her, irises alive, and roared as it flew through the air like a bullet to the wind.

She had remembered, long ago, that she had befriended them once before. It had been in a world where Yggdrasil had still been alive, where all creatures of all mannerisms came down to pray and give up offerings to their god, who had given them so much in the making of life. She averted her eyes quickly, and just as abruptly the vision faded.

Morgiana almost whispered the word, unblinking, as she came to her senses and stared, wide-eyed, at the one who'd connected her to that vision. Java grimaced, realizing what she'd done. The drums faded, Aladdin clapped and cheered with enthusiasm, but instead of addressing him Morgiana turned towards Java, questioning what had just happened as she stood in disbelief. Java pretended not to see.

"That was so cool," Aladdin said, smiling as encouragement. Morgiana quickly ducked her head and sat back down with an almost-frown, but her eyes were shining too much for it to be irritation.

Honeysuckle surrounded the clearing, and borne in small clusters among the grasslands were blue flags, clover, small blueberries still on the bushes. The Valokas stood in the corners of her vision, glowing a heavenly light as they flickered, before disappearing behind the trees. Java glanced back at the group, none of them having eaten in a while. She conjured food from nothing, passing it to them without a word of explanation. They didn't ask for one, except for Jamil, who looked at her with a face like he'd sucked on a lemon.

The ambiance of the lighting and the fire crackling reminded Java of rather fond memories, of creatures attracted to the glow in the night and mushroom circles. She'd met quite many beings, all of them friendly enough, and she propped her head on one hand.

"Want me to tell you a story?" Java asked, half-joking, poking the fire with a long stick and trying to think of other ways to avoid Morgiana's dead on gaze, but the group seemed to lean in, showing interested nods of assent. Her mind flailed a bit in a struggle to find something good to come up with, but there were many stories in her arsenal that came up to meet her, one she had somehow taken an attachment to. Java began to speak.

"There was a time where I met Judal, one of the four magi."

"You met another esteemed magi!?" Jamil's eyes almost bulged out of their sockets. He kowtowed in fear by the slightest mentioning of those people, she thought amusedly, then closed her eyes and continued speaking.

 _Bluntly speaking, Judal was bored._

 _The most recent capture the Kou Kingdom had successfully brought were pitiful, at most. Their original lives had solely been in hunting and gathering groups, and their crops were too poor to provide any decent sustenance to the villagers. Instead of finding ways to barter or trade with other villages, they stayed inclusive and fearful, waiting for the retribution of some holy God to save them all. This was how Kouen had found them: weak, frail, and overall useless._

 _The build of the houses were from frugal material, the property poorly tended, and the quality of the people themselves were weakened due to overworked limbs and malnourishment. Their eyes were sunken, their ribs visibly showing, and their medicinal house was a little less than a glorified tribal ceremony using smoke and magic, magic that was mostly water-based. Water did hold healing qualities, but it was not as effective when the healer had an earth-based affinity._

 _The villagers acquiesced to the prince's jurisdiction without any form of resistance, yet upon being questioned if they would obey small tariffs once the village turned to some form of income they still refused to let themselves to be addressed under the Kou name. The magi and the lower-ranking officials were then brought forward, confiscating both their freedom and their hopeless drive for self-preservation, and they were all turned into makeshift sources for black rukh instead. Subsequently, the villagers were all killed. This was supposed to be a win-win situation for the both of them, and yet Judal found that Kouen still seemed a bit displeased with the outcome._

 _Normally, such copious amounts of black rukh would've exhilarated him, and he could have enjoyed the screaming and the bloodshed a bit longer, but there was a point where Kouen's bad mood was infectious, not to mention scary. Furthermore, their lack of resistance made it too easy to push them around, much like puppets. Therefore Judal gave the order after their possessions were taken and their houses burned down, caught aflame and gone just as quickly in the dry, arid weather._

 _And he had no one else to entertain him. He glanced over at the petrified servants behind him, and one of them literally turned white in fear. He sighed and shook his head sadly, flicking his hand in a shooing motion before flying off towards the roof of Kouen's pagoda. He could, at least, figure out what to do after taking a nap._

 _A force shook him to the very core._

 _Wild-eyed, unbalanced, he flew sideways and into a nearby tree, smashing hard into one of its branches. Coughing from the impact, he looked around to see if he had imagined the earthquake or not; however, there was not a stone out of place. There had been no enormous gust of wind taking him off course, either. He could have brushed it off as something trivial, since he hasn't been known for being the strongest physically, but then he felt it again. Judal's brow furrowed as he turned his sights north and-_

 _There. He spotted something in the far distance, a waving of red that seemed out of place, some human coming from the shoreline. His eyesight strained as he struggled to see the silhouette clearly, wondering if it was just a false premonition or something he ate gone bad in his system, but then he saw the person moving - towards the direction of the city, too. There - it shone like a beacon, guiding black rukh towards itself, but when they reached the halo the rukh shivered as if stopped by will rather than magic. He could not place it, but there was something he felt when facing this being: was it fear?_

 _Judal scoffed. Surely he had hit his head a little too hard and his emotions became jumbled up: he could not feel any bloodlust or intimidation from the figure, and it couldn't even fly, to boot. He shot forward from the rooftop, clearing the distance in a matter of seconds. His heart felt as if it were beating a little faster, and yet he couldn't pinpoint the reason why._

 _He hovered at a great distance somewhat above and behind the person, making sure to circle around so that he would be out of sight at all times. Watching at a bird's eye view, he blinked in surprise at how young the person looked: they seemed to be a child just entering their adolescent stage, limbs thin and quite short. He could not discern if said child was male or female due to the cloak covering their face, though he could see flecks of rukh, the influence of magoi surrounding them. There was an aura of power that interested Judal more than anything, which was why he came closer, risking chance to take a better analysis of the kid._

 _"Hello," the figure said without moving, and Judal instantly fired off a fusillade of icicles in retaliation. They shattered upon impact and created a small halo of light particles, the powder from the ice returning to the air._

 _"Who are you?" He demanded. The child pointedly turned around and uncovered her head, velvet cloak shrugging itself off and into the ether. Judal sneered at the disappearing trick, realizing where he was exactly._

 _"I'm Java," she replied, hair just as red as the cloak that covered it. Her eyes were green, wide and innocent, but then they closed and her expression was serene. "I am a world hopper. How do you do?"_

 _"This is a dream," Judal said, but Java shrugged in response._

 _"It is," she agreed. Judal's eyes narrowed._

 _"I never dream of people, let alone children," he said, trailing after her despite himself as she started walking again. She continued on the path towards the palace, but Judal took another look and Kou flickered: it became a tower, a tree, a golden pillar, and then nothing at all. There were trees spanning as far as his eyesight could reach, and so he returned to hovering next to her as silence lapsed around them._

 _"I don't either," she replied easily. "I don't dream at all."_

 _Judal made a noise at that, carelessly shrugging off their topic of conversation. He changed tack, dropping directly in front of her and standing to full height. "What are you doing here?" He demanded. "What's your purpose?"_

 _"I'm here for your firstborn child," Java responded snarkily, and did a pirouette for extra effect. "No, I'm...here by accident."_

 _"Huh?" He sneered._

 _"I've been dropping into people's dreams recently, but it's been the same three people. You're the last one," she told him, listing them off with her fingers. "There's the goofy looking guy with the green wizard hat, the girl who's apparently centuries old, and the child who..." She glanced at his braid in slow realization. "...have you had a child recently?"_

 _"Shut up, I had that hairstyle first," Judal frowned. "_ _You met them already?_ _Even the kid? He wasn't even supposed to exi-"_

 _Silver rukh, tinted gold by the morning sun, trailed behind the figure as they walked. Footsteps were left behind, glowing with rukh that Judal found himself staring at openmouthed. Java turned to him in confusion once he stopped floating. "What?"_

 _"How." It was a question, but it also felt vaguely like a threat. Java caught a glimpse of the silver bird, waving it aside like an irritant as if it had little significance. Judal felt like he was staring at someone who was not a child - no, not even human. No human has ever accomplished this before._

 _"It keeps following me," Java scowled, making a face for the first time. "They keep telling me to do this, do that, but I can't do that when I can't even stay to-"_

 _"Repeat that sentence." Judal leaned over and grabbed her suddenly, and she looked up in shock. He couldn't help his gripping as he heard something that unnerved him further. Everything she had said seemed even more outlandish than the last, but the proof was right in front of him now: the rukh she carried was silver, bright yet not, holding darkness in its shell but not in a cage like a damaged animal. "Repeat that sentence."_

 _"I can't stay to fix-"_

 _"No! The thing before that." He shook her again. She seemed a little out of sorts and dizzy, and he let her go in embarrassment as he realized he was being a bit excessive. "The rukh spoke?"_

 _"Yeah, it says dumb things all the time." She waved a hand. "It's like a broken record, too, and sometimes I get them to shut up. Not all the time, though."_

 _That was when she noticed his rukh._ _It rose like a black tsunami, intensely aware of her presence, and under her close examination Judal felt ashamed for reasons he didn't know how to explain. Her magoi was almost engulfed by the birds getting pulled towards her, and Judal realized that they wanted it - they wanted to be whole again, human like them, and Java hurriedly pulled herself away before they could engulf Judal as well. Cold chills ran up and down his back, rising frost littering snow along his fingertips. He felt afraid, not because of the rukh but because of himself. He had hope. He needed to crush it before his feelings consumed him._

 _"Pull your rukh back," Java ordered. Judal glowered._

 _"They want to be whole. Not gonna do it?" His arms dropped to his sides. This was a match he couldn't compete against, not when she could decimate his attack in an instant. Here was his savior, ready to spare the world of black rukh. She'd already gotten the rundown from the other three anyway, and being 'good' was their whole gist. What use was his word against theirs?_

 _"Why do you think I want to do that?" She responded. Judal's heart skipped a beat. He stole a glance._

 _She was holding up a hand, but there was no visible borg stopping the rukh from flooding her. They were held back regardless, flapping wings to no avail as they struggled to escape from midair. "Don't you know they're human?" He asked. "If they're dark rukh, they'll stay like that forever, trapped in their own memories like flies in a spiderweb. That's what fuels their hate. That's what fuels Al Thamen."_

 _Java smiled, and to his surprise it was not a bitter one. She hadn't looked at him with anything resembling disgust since she'd seen his rukh, to tell the truth. "I'm not god, so I'm not going to be playing as one," she responded. Judal snorted, but didn't tell her otherwise. She may as well be god, since Ill Ilah was something to fear. None of them could stand a chance against the destroyer of worlds._

 _"What's up with you?" He laughed, and to his horror he felt the stinging of tears as they started to well up. He bit into the side of his cheek to try and quell them, and with some effort they were forced back. "You haven't said a word about how spiteful I am, about how I shouldn't fall to evil or some other stupid crap I've already heard a thousand times."_

 _"The rukh itself is an abomination," Java said to him as if mentioning the weather. "It's not the person. I've been here to watch the Old World die, and despite the struggles those people faced they have never been under as much duress as you are every second of your life."_

 _"The hell does that mean?" He asked._

 _During the interlude Java began to quietly explain herself, rambling about places far beyond where he's ever ventured before, and to his utter terror he had liked the comforting gesture. He had never known anybody, not one person, who had ever sympathized with him, not after knowing what those of the white rukh preached of. She told him about worlds where there were no rukh, worlds where feelings like love and hate were not separated at all: you were allowed to despise one person with every fiber of your being and love someone else with that same intensity. She told him about how unnatural the feelings here were, where black and white were as stark and clear as day, and their lives were placed on a chessboard like some sort of game, with only two sides and the shittiest rulebook known to man._

 _Through this Judal also figured out just who she was, traveling these worlds as if going on a mere stroll, and yet her purpose was to save each and every one of them from an avoidable doom. Suns exploding were not one of them, of course, but as Java mentioned Ill Ilah Judal felt a shiver that almost felt similar to the feeling he had before. This time, he let it be. She was of an entirely different caliber, where she could shatter ice without making a single sound or move, where rukh was swayed by just one hand._

 _"I see," he finally spoke once she had finished her part. He felt infinitely lighter, a part of him craving recognition finally having been satiated, and he relaxed minutely under her gaze. All four magi should have known of the imbalance. They should have known, and yet Judal had always felt like the only one who still cared. What were they doing, those fucks, prancing off in some fairytale land where everyone was nice and only the evil were punished?_

 _"Don't blame them," Java said, scratching the back of her head to relieve tension. "It's a lie that everybody wants to believe in. Even me. A world where the monsters are monsters, through and through, and the heroes are heaven-sent with only the purest of intentions. Nobody is ever that perfect. It is the impossible standard."_

 _"I don't exactly have the cleanest record myself," Judal smirked, and with that statement Java knocked him upside the head. He shot her a betrayed look. "What the hell? What did I do?"_

 _"Not all of the people you killed deserved it," she reprimanded, and he rolled his eyes._

 _"Changing the rukh is like changing the very emotions of a person," Java told him solemnly. "They were angry for a reason when they died. I ruin the final decisions of people who were wrongfully ended, and instead of giving them freedom and fixing history I'm telling people who were murdered to get over it."_

 _"Okay, now you're starting to sound like those three," he prodded, goading her on. "Some people don't deserve to be 'fixed.' Their lives were forfeit as soon as they disobeyed. We are always civil in negotiations, but once they step out of hand we act accordingly. Does that sound like someone who didn't deserve it?"_

 _"...Alright. That's your belief, and I won't argue against it," she sighed, dropping the topic. Judal saw her fading and jerked towards her, expression panicked. Was she disappearing?_

 _"Wait! Where are you going?"_

 _"I don't plan on sticking around forever, y'know," Java replied, amused, and although he knew that he was reluctant to let this be a goodbye. He shot ice at her without a moment's notice. She flung the cloak that materialized out of nowhere over her head, and then she altogether disappeared._

 _Judal blinked, catching the cloak in his hands._ _"Goodbye for now," her voice said, faintly over the rushing in his ears, and quickly Judal awoke, his head shooting up and out of his bed. His hands were still holding on to something, latched onto that phantom cloak, but in his hands there was no proof that it had ever existed. He sat there in his bedchambers for a minute, contemplating, before a smile grew wicked across his face._

 _"We'll meet again," he laughed, and then he made to start yet another tedious day._

* * *

 _His next appearance was in the middle of a desert._

 _Java had been watching for bandits near the roads, and so she had kept wary attention for anything that moved or looked out of place in the distance. She felt them first - t_ _here were two large pockets of energy signals to her left at the moment, coming to the crossroads ahead of her at a steady pace. She knew immediately that they were no mere bandits, but she still could not tell who exactly they were: one had exceeding amounts of magoi stored within him, rolling in waves along his borg like waterfalls. The other she recognized, strangely: his signature was dark, ominous, and she knew that she had come across this man before._

 _However, the first visual cue of their entrance made her backtrack in horror._

 _Java had not expected that many targets following after those two, and the numbers surrounding them were over one thousand in foot soldiers. Kou flags rose ominously like a red dawn, staining the sand bloody with the effect of the mirage. She recognized the floating magi even from afar, dark braid flinging in the desert winds. Judging by the wild waving, Judal appears to have seen her as well._

 _"Look who it is," Judal grinned as she remained unmoving, allowing them to approach. "It took a while, but I managed to fall asleep without having anybody on my back about creating more dungeons again. Stupid pricks," he muttered under his breath. "Where are you outside of this realm? I want to meet you someday, too!"_

 _Java eyed him warily. He held both hands up in a sign of surrender. "Hey! I'm nice!"_

 _"Who are these people?" She asked, her head tilting to acknowledge the people behind the magi. She was assuming they were real, judging by how they looked when they had spotted Judal's insane, giddy smile. Judal's face twitched._

 _"I might've told them a thing or two and they used a Clairvoyance spell," he muttered, and Java waved an arm over them so that the spell on both the figures and the sky were shattered. She felt the soldiers crumple, one by one, as Al Thamen removed their puppets and returned to reality. Only Kouen was left standing, watching her with a burning gaze._

 _"Who are you?" She asked him directly. It was more for appearance's sake, she already knew who he was. Judal dropped his head on top of hers, removing any intimidating gesture she could have made. Java rolled her eyes at his antics._

 _"This is Prince Kouen, first prince in line to the Kingdom of Kou," Judal introduced dramatically, wrapping his arms around her. Java felt sweat begin to drip down the side of her neck as his grip tightened: it seems that Judal was trying to cage her in so that she wouldn't escape like she did last time. Which was foolish, considering she was somewhat interested in talking at the moment._

 _"Uhh..." She raised a hand and waved slightly, putting on a strained smile. "Hi. I'm Java. Nice goatee."_

 _She could feel Kouen's look grow more displeased by the minute. Judal bent over in full body tremors, attempting to cover his laugh by coughing profusely._

 _"Thank you," Kouen responded, and Judal's coughing blew out into a full out choking. Java turned around and punched him in the chest so that he stopped making dying noises so close to her ear._

 _"Meet - ahem, Java," Judal finally managed, sporadic trembling finally diminished. "She's the one I keep talking about."_

 _"I'm honored you think of me so highly," she joked. Instead of taking offense, though, Judal sobered._

 _"I don't even know how strong you are," Judal told her, "but you can hear the rukh. That's something that nobody should ever be able to do, unless they had the powers of a god."_

 _The word 'god' again. Java blew a strand of hair out of her face in displeasure but accepted it without refuting. At this, Kouen's eyes sharpened. "What exactly are you?" He demanded. "Judal, you've told me countless times before that no human is capable of doing so." Judal shrugged._

 _"I can't say. There's another thing, though: she isn't human. I'm pretty sure." The hand he held his wand with loosened, and he spared her an apologetic glance. Java didn't take offense: it was correct, after all. "Even I can't shatter their spells that fast."_

 _Kouen turned his head to observe Java. Caught unawares, she stiffened up, letting him scrutinize her as he leaned over in an anticipatory way. "Tell me."_

 _Java considered him, taking him seriously. He had asked Aladdin ago, sometime far along in the future, and he would not take no for an answer. Java wondered what would happen if she tried to get on his bad side right now.  
_

 _"You know, you're not what I expected for a Kou prince," Java admitted when she disapparated and reappeared out of thin air beside Judal. The magi jerked back in surprise. "I was sure that you were going to try and take me back to Kou, given how Al Thamen wants me dead and everything."_

 _Both Kouen and Judal seemed thrown off by that news, though Kouen barely showed it by raising one single brow_ _. "Al Thamen covets something you have, whether you are something to be eradicated or you are simply too powerful. I'm assuming it's both. You've seen the Old World." It was not a question. Java frowned at Judal, who hurriedly whistled and floated away with his arms behind his head. How much did that guy tell them? Kouen seemed to have gotten his answer just from that response, and his eyes gleamed even more in a greedy light. Java shrunk back. Now might be a good time to escape._

 _That man would have much more time to mull over regarding her capabilities, because as soon as he tried to capture her Java put her hands together and a loud noise shot like a thunderclap, bursting magical energy with its impact._

 _Kouen felt his skin shift, the familiar feeling of electricity ran across his arms, coming to a rest somewhere along his torso. This locking in had the properties of disconnecting him from his magoi, he thought, flexing his hands to feel the buzz of energy. He had been well informed in theory, though he was slightly uncomfortable with this feeling, which was extremely similar to the way dungeons worked to keep him from using other djinns. Judal shrieked and fell on top of a pile of bushes._

 _"You'll figure it out eventually anyway," Java shouted as she began the process of removing herself from Judal's dream. Just in time was Judal's reawakening: Al Thamen probably wanted to pull them out prematurely, unable to see what was going on in the non-physical realm. Kouen glared up at her, hands flexing as if wanting to strip her bones clean. "Ask Aladdin! He'll know!"_

 _"Who is Aladdin?"_

 _That question was never answered as Java blinked and returned again. She felt as if she'd dodged a bullet there. She would not see either of them for a while after that encounter, but she was sure that they would forget her after enough time had passed._

 _Right?_

"Seriously?" Aladdin cried once the story was finished. "You pushed everything on me? What do I even do?"

"Don't worry, it'll take a while until that happens," Java laughed, thumping him on the back. Aladdin threw a pinecone at her in retaliation, which she batted aside and ricocheted onto Jamil's toes. Jamil yelped.

"Based on how you described him, I think I should be fearing for my life," Aladdin shivered, rubbing his forearms to get rid of invisible goosebumps. Java had stopped feeding the fire and it had finally gone out, rising smoke and ash as a cue that they should probably sleep soon. Jamil was outraged at the camping treatment he was getting, but one look from Java and he shut up. He seemed pensive after the story, it seemed, though he still poked barbed comments at them when Alibaba tried talking with the guy. Java wondered where all of that hatred came from.

"Go to sleep, guys," she told them, and they seemed eager enough as they shuffled off to various positions. Surprisingly, Goltas removed himself from the group and slept closer to Jamil, who had hunched over as the rope continued to hold him up. Java had no pity for him.

She watched over them as they went to sleep in makeshift tents and blankets, using cloaks that they carried and some of the clothes from Jamil's bag (which they looted, unsurprisingly.) Aladdin began drooling as he slept, making Alibaba extremely uncomfortable as he tried to push Aladdin's face off from his side. Morgiana seemed as still as a corpse, though Java could see movement behind the girl's eyelids. Goltas was propped upright, impassive, but the eye behind the mask was closed. Java was pretty sure the guy was asleep. As for Jamil...

He was watching her, just as she had been watching him. "Some people don't deserve redemption," he said dully, hair falling over his face. "I like this Judal. He isn't stupid, at least. What about you, then? What do you believe?"

This was the least pretentious Jamil had ever been, so Java didn't hesitate when sitting down across from the guy. Her eyes bored holes into his face, but still he did not falter. She supposed this guy wasn't entirely useless with using a poker face: apparently living with a silver spoon had managed to impart some intelligence. Just maybe a bit too much pride. And sadism. Not enough parental care, maybe.

"I think that most of the time, people are angry for justified reasons," she said resolutely. "And that they have the right to be angry. It's an emotion that is impossible to ignore. But sometimes the anger is directed towards the wrong people, and that's what causes discrepancies. It's your duty to make sure who and who doesn't deserve the blame, if there is anything to blame about at all."

Jamil didn't respond after that. Java assumed he fell asleep and got up to leave, but she heard his voice again, barely decipherable but still there: "I'm sorry."

Goltas didn't reply. However, once she left, the man shifted his mask towards the tree Jamil was tied under, one silent sign of recognition. By the morning, Jamil's rope was cut and Java moved them along.

Alibaba and Jamil were still on bad terms, sadly: every time one of them accidentally bumped into one another or came too close, they both bristled like angry cats ready to claw each other's eyes out. Aladdin wisely stepped in between them so that nothing was instigated, and overall the ambiance of their makeshift team remained calm. Morgiana kept to Java, which was a little surprising since she didn't remember when she became someone people wanted to hang with, but apparently she had a tolerable enough presence. Goltas, statue as he was, kept to the back.

They continued through dense shrubbery and jungle plants in which a long-worn path was already cleared out for them. Curling roses bloomed like scarlet crystals upon walls of verdant green, staining red and catching fire in the rising dawn. In the distance rose two towering spires, sharp spears that evened to pierce the sky as a small reminder of the city they had come from the previous day. Java had to admit that although some of the people in Qishan were less than savory, the plant life outside it was surprisingly good. Despite the deep, precise colors this pretty picture painted, Java felt that it contrasted with the ugly scene they'd faced with the slave line being hustled through the crowd.

Java paused as thunder rumbled, spotting bad weather rolling in. It loomed above her in dark clouds, the promise of storm, and morosely she observed a conveniently-placed village as they went to take cover. The group went and crept under one of the buildings to watch the drizzling begin, out of place and annoyed. This was when the plot was supposed to take them on some strange adventure to transform straw into gold, or to save a lindworm, Java thought, shaking her head as the Valokas poked their heads out from around trees. Well, thank the lord nothing caught her attention now. That got old real fast.

There were a variety of garden plants below, neat and symmetrical rows of hydrangeas and scarlet amaranthus. Besides a few spots of creeping juniper, she could spot the telltale foliage of Japanese maple. The grass was highlighted crimson and the red flowers emanated the glow, turning translucent petals orange through the sun's gaining warmth. She turned to contemplate the house they were resting under, and Aladdin looked at her curiously.

The village as a whole seemed worn down, cast away by their people. They hadn't seen anyone since they came in, either, which Java found extremely off. There were no sounds, either, just rain, and she could see no sign of human life. There were holes in some of the houses, she realized, just wide enough to be used as peepholes, but there was no movement when she turned and crouched down to look. It was barely large enough to fit a few fingers, and she could not see any lower than the middle of the far wall due to a piece of furniture blocking her way. The doors are unguarded, Java mused. There were no windows, and the holes were not even big enough to fit her hand through.

Apparently, Jamil seemed restless. "The hell are we going?" He growled, head turning to look back at Qishan's palace towers, barely in sight. The trees obstructed him from even seeing the tops of the structure, however, and he settled for glowering emptily into the morning, grumpy and withdrawn. "This place is deserted. What are we sticking around for?"

Alibaba pointed at the sky with a deadpan look. Jamil sneered at him and turned away, crossing his arms.

Java contemplated a tree growing quietly next to where they were standing. Using the momentum, she ran up, grabbed a low branch, swung up sideways and landed neatly on a high vantage point so she could see the other buildings more clearly. The leaves trembled violently, and a few fell off their post. She squinted her eyes - there they were, a concerning congregation of Kamalas (black djinns, too) roaming about on the other end of the village.

"They were taken from here," she said slowly, the thought dawning. "The slave line. They must have been walked through here, but maybe they came to pick up any 'extra stragglers' along the way."

Morgiana bowed her head, visibly uncomfortable. Aladdin saw what she did as well, and his face was grim. "They're coming."

"I got it." At this, she burst forward with magoi-enhanced speed while kicking up dirt, earning exclamations of surprise and striking at one of the djinns with a powerful aim. Her arm went straight in instead of through the mass, but the djinn exploded and a hail of black rukh came spiraling after her.

 _Free us,_ they called, but instead of listening to them she blazed high like a kamikaze, soaring in magic and setting off a chain reaction of explosions as she ricocheted from one to another. The djinns exploded and the Kamalas retreated, dispelled for now. There was no source for these djinns: they had left a long time ago, towed away by slave traders. This was just the unfortunate aftermath they had left behind, she thought, bowing her head.

The dark rukh murmured, prodding at her with all of the malice they contained in their small bodies, but Java knew there were other options. She swung a hand and made them scatter, rising up and into the winds, returning them to Ill Ilah.

"What the fuck," she said as she felt an all-too-familiar magi flying at insane speeds in her direction, and a split second later a crater opened up in the ground as he made impact. Judal stood grinning, proudly puffing out his chest in glee as he found her for the second time in person.

Judal brushed off dust from his body, exclaiming through slight panting breaths, "Found you, finally!"

"Don't you have anything better to do, Judal?" She put her face in her hands. Alibaba was staring, slack-jawed, but Aladdin seemed wary, holding his staff out in front of him with suspicion.

"But you're the most interesting!" Judal crowed, then added with a sly smile, "besides, aren't you glad that I stopped these guys from telling ol' mother dearest?" In his palm were several of the black rukh, messengers who had been ready to relay the event.

"Whatever," Java said, waving a hand. Judal pouted, clearly having wanted some sort of reward.

"Oh?" He glanced over at the group behind her, spotting the magi, blue braid tumbling behind him. Alibaba pointed shakily, looking back and forth between Judal and Aladdin.

"D-did you..."

"Hah?" Judal preened, raising himself to his full height. "That's right, I'm one of the original magi! I am far above the power level of the other two."

"...have a son?"

The wind blew through the village, whistling against the windowpanes of the houses there. It kicked up both Judal's and Aladdin's braids, the most obvious source of Alibaba's concern, and with that Judal's bloodlust shot up, skyrocketing past his normally 'barely acceptable' amount. Java sucked in through her teeth and forced Aladdin to trip just as icicles skewered where his braid had just been seconds before.

"Hey!" She lunged at Judal, grabbing him by the torso and demobilizing the black magi. "Don't kill him, idiot!"

"Thalg Al-Salos," she heard him say, voice muffled into her hair with that damned grin on his face, but she heard it anyway and pulled back immediately as water splashed down in the place of ice, canceling the spell. A whip of the oceanwater coiled around Java and she held her grip, carrying Judal along with her as she was flung across the pathway. The foundation of the houses wobbled and Judal laughed maniacally. The droplets shimmered for a moment, then reformed and coiled along his arms much in the way of a rearing snake.

"The hell are you doing?" Java shrieked as they were both shot skyward, ground falling fast beneath them until she could barely see Aladdin's figure, horrified. Judal put his arm around her waist and turned his head eastward, towards Kou, and Java realized what he was about to do. "Oh shit! Put me down!"

But Judal had already begun to fly at the same astronomical speeds that he had flown on the way here. Java saw the village far in the distance behind them, mourning their brief interaction forlornly. Java looked as if she had suddenly given up, body falling limp in a defeated position.

Judal was not swayed by her act, for when she placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed off immediately, aiming a palm heel strike directly at his exposed cheek, he turned his face to avoid it and she hit air. Java blasted magoi from her hand through her outstretched forearm and went back into a rising elbow to jut into the underside of his chin, but he caught her with a knee that nearly hit her stomach, and her aim went haywire. He would not tread carefully this time: Judal held on tight as she wiggled about, cursing expletives.

Java wound up, no wasted motion: Judal leaned forward to land a kiss, but Java leaned back, disgusted. "Ew, gross," she shrieked, withdrawing as he pecked the top of her head in a sign of affection.

"Haha! A weakness!" Judal attempted to nuzzle her but she smacked him in the forehead, moving off his near-contact and dug a heel into a vulnerable area below the kneecap, at the same time latching onto his arm as well and going over him. She couldn't stop him as he tossed her hard upwards, but she caught herself and started to fly back in the opposite direction, attempting to escape.

Judal caught her foot and began reining her back in, and Java shook, brute force definitely enough to keep him off. She dropped gravity magic, increasing her weight a hundredfold and dropping like a stone. Judal was determined, holding on even as they were almost impaled by trees and just a few feet away from death, but then he let go and she nimbly banked, brushing against the ground with the tips of her hair.

Java suddenly forced magoi into her palms and Judal's eyes shot open in realization as she made contact with his chest, blasting him straight on. The nerves that were suddenly blocked made him stop moving as he nearly crumpled at the power she had shot directly into his system, locking up his joints. Somebody wheezed, whether it was her or him she couldn't tell. He had flinched, his posture telling her he had not expected the magoi-laced strike, then he sighed and tipped his head forward in a sign of defeat.

"Okay, okay, I lose," he said, falling backward and lying limp, unmoving. "You beat me, oh, woe is me."

Java thought for a moment, inspecting his disheveled appearance. Tired eyes stared back at her, waiting. She turned to look through the dense foliage, but she could not even see where she had spent the last night resting. She picked up a stray leaf that had tangled in Judal's braid.

"Okay, what do you want?" She sat down as well with a slight 'oof' for effect. "I'm assuming you want something, coming all the way here."

"I wanted a fight," he said sadly, as if that was his final dying wish.

"Well, you have that already. What else do you want?" She leaned back on her arms, taking a breather. "Preferably something to talk about, if you don't mind."

Judal eyed her as she unlocked his joints, pulling him back up. "Where did you come from?" He asked first, wincing as he felt pins and needles stick into his arms and legs. Java poked at them unrelentingly and he batted her away. "What does the rukh know?"

"Woah there, don't give me a list now," Java spoke in monotone, reclining back in her spot. "Well, I came from the God of the universe, the almighty tree of life. Yggdrasil, if you know the lore. All things were born there, including the concept of life and death, space and time."

Judal raised both brows, clearly in disbelief, but Java shrugged it off. "The rukh doesn't know a lot, to be honest. The minds of all deaths from the Old World, all jumbled together, do not grow any smarter in the end. Their mortal lives still tremble in the face of Ill Ilah, death and destroyer of all things. Ill Ilah is just a false image of death, however, because it has a voice and it speaks without shame."

"Ill Ilah can speak?" Judal asked, and Java became aware of just how little Gyokuen and Al Thamen cared to explain to the black magi.

"Gyokuen communicates with him very often, and that is why she is carrying out his will, so she claims," Java replied in a sardonic voice. "Only gods have followers and wills. Ill Ilah is a god, and nothing else."

"Just a god, huh," Judal said, returning that same sarcasm with ease. "Well, if I had that much power, that's what I would do as well."

"Another thing is this concept of rukh," Java said, and there was frustration laced into her speech. "Why does this afterlife exist? Their voices are from worlds I've destroyed. People you've killed. People with or without a sibling, a parent. Sometimes they are as old as the sky and the sea, and sometimes they are their own individual, so tiny on this speck of land they call home."

Judal could say nothing. He had not felt any remorse for those he had killed before: they had simply been in his way. Most times, arrogance was an evil that could not be forgiven, and Judal did not want to waste his time waiting for them to think on it. However, there were people worse than him. They were also the people that died. Judal told her this as a counterpoint, and she sighed all the harder.

"You may not believe in people, but I do," Java told him. "Everyone is bad in some way, maybe to specifically one or several people or groups, and there will never be one completely good person in this world, ever. But at the same time, I think that everyone is also good and that they have the capacity for good in them. That is what being human is, the yin and yang. That is the human experience."

"I call that 'having a bias'," Judal said. "Nepotism, racism, extremism. It's all from having a familiarity to one side. It's a fault, but it's also the way people normally function. I will never see the good you see in humans, Java, because those so-called good traits you say humans have, I see as quirks of a terrible design."

"I believe you are good, Judal," Java said to him seriously, and Judal jerked up as if he had been hit with a lightning strike.

"That's a bias," he said to her sharply, but for some reason he could feel himself shaking. "The rukh doesn't believe that."

"...Well, that's true," she said, and although it was truth Judal felt a part of him wither again. "But you believe in good things, too. I see it in you. You may do some things I still don't agree with, but I'm still willing to be your friend."

Judal pursed his lips. For a split second, he could feel frustration spark inside him, then sadness, then resignment, and lastly - just a little - happiness. He bowed his head low, angling his face without actually covering his eyes. He still could not understand her sympathy, but at the same time he was glad that she had been so open about professing their friendship and not trying to force him to change to standard. He fell back on the ground, crumpling like a ragdoll as he lost the rest of his strength.

Java yawned and craned her head, cracking a few joints to make herself more comfortable. "Al Thamen incubates black rukh in slaves like the ones I met a day earlier," she included. "They made it, they used it, and they don't care how they get it as long as they eventually did get more. They'd realized that when they found remnants of villages, using those left behind starving and waiting to die."

Judal didn't know where she was going with this, but then she continued. "The young women and children in the areas where I lived once were taken. The men fought and died. The slave traders took orders from Al Thamen, simply to bring them to certain camps and starve them, force them into labor, whip them. I'm assuming this violence was ordered based off what I heard from a man in one of the villages that were taken, it may not have been an order at all. The slaves died a few hours later, some of many who could not eat anymore because they were too weak. Very few came out alive." She looked at Judal directly. "I know you, for one, have been on the receiving end of Al Thamen. And then you became their magi."

"I got used to it," Judal said, but relented once Java continued her staring, unamused. "What? I was trained. They gave me the promise of being strong, and with that all I had to do was obey. Turning a blind eye is much easier, Java, when you believe that their lives are a game. I learned."

Judal stood up fast, and Java's eyes darted to him immediately. He leaned over her, anger fueling his movements, and Java leaned back a little warily. "You don't need to suffer for something as stupid as this," he said, a proclamation from a mantra he had most definitely been told himself. "You don't need to care so much. I've killed millions, Java, what does it matter? Those men, if you hadn't killed them, they probably would have died by someone else's hand sooner or later. The world doesn't need a savior. People die, whether from sickness, from strife, from starvation, and one person trying their best is not going to change that. That is just a fool's dream."

"You can try," Java said lowly, but then shook her head. "Never mind. I understand your point. But that is from a human's perspective, Judal, and one thing I've seen that remains universal throughout many worlds is that when people care, the impossible happens. I believe in that one in a million chance."

She slung one hand over his shoulder, prodding him. "Now up," she ordered, and Judal complied. "Fly me back to where I started off, they might have left because of you being an idiot."

"False charges, I daresay," Judal moaned in reply, but ended up piggybacking her as they flew up, high past noon and making the slow journey back.

Several hours later, Java spotted the group she'd been with yet again. Alibaba was carrying a map and seemingly arguing with Jamil, and the both of them were tugging at the paper hard enough that it was close to ripping. Aladdin punched them both and said a few rebuking words, and then they resumed their trek. Judal descended.

The series of hills were less steep and more like small mounds in an otherwise open field, and Judal brushed past the foliage that grew around them. There were several spots of upturned soil, and he had to question why they were there as they landed.

"How the heck did you even find this place, anyway?" Judal looked above them. The trees were already tall, but because of the village being surrounded by hills they seemed even taller from below. "You wouldn't even be able to tell from above!"

"Don't know. Stumbled upon it earlier this morning." Java whistled, alerting Goltas first who saw them coming up from behind. He remained as stiff as ever, she thought as Morgiana headed towards her eagerly (she still didn't know what she did, what was happening.) Java looked around, decided this place was wide enough for a house to be, and promptly made a house materialize right next to the road. Jamil screamed.

She swung open the door without hesitation. The walls were a little old, just as her old house used to be, and there were a couple of dirty plates on the counter, but otherwise the house appeared humble and warm. Java started to make soup using bones and vegetables, both in which she cooked in a large pot and all having been created out of nowhere again. "What the fuck!" Jamil whispered, trembling as he walked in but shrinking away from both her and the kitchen as if she had summoned the devil. "What the fuck!"

"What's up with him?" She asked Aladdin, who didn't have much as an answer. Morgiana and Goltas eyed the furniture but chose to remain standing, close to the wall and out of the way. Alibaba forcibly shoved Morgiana into a seat.

"Maybe he's scared of small houses. I think I know someone who's like that."

"I think that's claustrophobia," Alibaba helpfully intoned. Aladdin snapped his fingers in confirmation.

"Yeah, that!"

"Here you go," Java said, throwing a peach she made to Judal. The magi caught it and blinked at it uncomprehendingly.

"How did you know I like peaches?" He asked in confusion.

"Uh..." Java furrowed her brow. "Intuition."

Judal cast her a strange look, but he bit into it anyway and sat on the couch, taking up most of the space there by sprawling out. Jamil seemed taken to the guy, most likely due to the descriptive story she'd told them before. Java was almost a hundred percent sure that as soon as Jamil opened his mouth he'd be frozen on the spot, though, and dutifully averted her eyes back to the stove. Behind her, Alibaba leaned down and whispered something to Aladdin. The kid choked at whatever he said and bent over in a struggle to breathe. Goltas walked over and thumped him on the back once. He coughed, spazzing a little before sighing in relief. Java cleared her throat in an attempt to hide a snort.

"Here. Eat." Java procured many dishes out of nowhere and placed them down on a mahogany table covered in cloth. The blue-haired child downed a glass of orange juice that magically and perpetually refilled itself before saying thanks and wolfing down food like a madman. "Sit down, your highnesses. I know the food may not be as exotic as what you probably eat every day, but it should be tolerable, at least."

Both Morgiana and Goltas have figured out by now that they were allowed to eat together with the rest of them and sat down accordingly, though they still stayed out of Jamil's sights. That was probably for the best. Judal stuck a tongue out with that introduction, but he took a seat as well next to a nervous Alibaba. Aladdin was sandwiched in between Jamil and Alibaba yet again. Java felt bad for him.

As she began to add oil to the pan to make pancakes, Aladdin leaned over Alibaba's shoulder and whispered loudly.

"Alibaba wanted to know, but are you actually a girl in disguise?"

Judal choked on his water while Java fell over and rolled on the ground, dead with howling laughter. Alibaba had slammed his face into the table, steam coming out of his head. Morgiana had covered her mouth with one hand, but Java could see the beginning of a smile. Aladdin grinned, oblivious, and although Java knew that they weren't blood-related she thought that the way they made trouble was too similar. "You have very long hair and your face is sorta girly, but I do know your voice is a little deeper than a woman's."

"You weren't - even - ten seconds in," Java wheezed, almost close to sobbing.

Judal pulled out his wand, eyes aflame. "I'll kill you."

"No!" Jamil leapt forward and in front of the boy. "You mustn't, esteemed magi!"

Java stared at the man. Again, this guy was being a good person for once. Jamil ruined it by opening his mouth again: "Killing another magi is a terrible loss, why not kill the girl instead?"

"Hey!" Java said, offended. She didn't even do anything yet! Judal eyed the noble, contemplating this mere ant's existence and his couple of words.

"Why should I? She's better than this trash."

Now Aladdin was offended. "I'm not trash!" He cried, only to be forced back by a wave of magic, slamming into Alibaba who had been behind him. Morgiana caught them both before all three went slamming into the wall, causing a dent that Java fixed just as easily.

"Oh, shit, the pancakes are burning," Java realized, rushing over to the counter and ignoring the mess going on behind her. This group, she mused as she ducked an incoming ice spear, would likely never know peace.

* * *

Judal was staring off into the distance again.

Kouen observed him stoically, knowing exactly who and what he was thinking about. Kouen still could not determine whether that person was even human, but he knew for sure that she did not come from this world. Judal's fingers flexed in anticipation, and so Kouen called out, "are you that interested in seeing her?"

Judal turned his head back toward Kouen, and his eyes were alight. "She's strong," he said, hungry for fighting. "And she knows things. So many things."

"Like what?" He asked, propping his head on one hand to support it. Judal knew exactly what that pose meant: Kouen seemed interested as well, and his desire for information was on full alert. Judal hummed but refused to say what.

"She can hear what the rukh says, for one," Judal said, and Kouen slammed both hands on his desk, startling the magi.

"How?" Kouen was almost seething, not with rage but with anticipation. A scholar at heart, Judal thought, settling back down at his post on the windowsill. Koumei would cry if he had his spot as number one library visitor taken, anyhow.

"I don't know, ask her yourself," Judal sighed, turning over so that his back faced the room. "All I wanted to do was fight. She beat me in my own fucking dream. A _dream_!"

"Possibly because you were inferior, even in intellect," Kouen surmised, and Judal chucked a book at him. It smashed into the wall behind Kouen and landed directly on the pages, leaving permanent marks on where the papers had been folded. Kouen looked up icily and Judal started fearing for his life.

"Don't you dare move," Kouen growled, and Judal immediately took off with a high-pitched scream of fear.

* * *

nope i failed

HEY ALSO THANKS FOR ALL THE REVIEWS! I appreciate that a lot, which is why I wanted to make an extra-long chapter (even though it took months whoops)


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